Today i saw the news reports
about m's friend dying.

i didn't expect to,
but i cried
with my knees and forehead to the ground
and my arms stretched out like rivers,
as if this sudden sadness
could drain out of my body,
& into the earth,
like water.

Today the kids used the hose to pour puddles into the sand.
Angry about the waste,
i suddenly remembered that
water never leaves us,
only loses its clear-eyed purity.

i imagined its strange journey,
rising up through air and sky,
in the heat of day,
taking
all the dirt around it
into its fragile body.

I imagined the relief of being rain,
in that moment when gravity takes over,
and you know this is what you were meant for:
the perfect forgiveness of falling.

and then, once on earth
to keep sinking,
slowly,
through sand and graves,
the homes
and deaths
of many animals,
the soil
smelling like their memories.

to remember,
wide-eyed, opening, deepening,
all that came before.

all the love and violence,
bound together
like water and toxicity
that we take into our bodies,
just trying to survive.

we are not pure,
not any of us.
the dirt of this world
is clenched
in our blood
in the cloth of our skin,
the gnarled roots of bones
that keep us standing on the ground.

Oh, to seep slowly down into the earth,
unclean and whole.
It would feel like mourning,
like when i sink into my chest,
softening.

Now, listening to the report of the assassination,
i lie curled on the carpet,
imagining stories dripping into pools below me,
an aquifer of sadness
underneath the ground.

Today i am safe.

But sometimes,
the earth cracks open.
Sometimes we fall.