The Edge of the Fold
A shadow slips between the walls,
silence spun in whispers of glass.
The sky trembles like a leaf in the wind,
fragments of time scattered,
folding back on themselves.
My name and yours
sunk in an arctic of moments,
where the sun hoards its secrets
and the earth keeps turning without sound.
But the light—
it comes,
untouched,
through the cracks of the attic door,
silent as a bird
lifting from the dark.
The night speaks in stones
holding its breath.
In the silence,
the stones remember
the weight of lost names.
I walk through the night,
each step a new shape of time,
each thought a shadow cast
on the stony curvature of distant worlds.
I could reach for the stars,
but my hands are full of rain,
and my mouth is silent
with the taste of salt and ash.
Beneath my feet,
the earth listens
with the patience of sorrow.
And you—
you are not far,
but your absence
is a mirror
I carry with me.
Somewhere,
the stars stammer
like a forgotten chant,
but the wind, like a lover’s final breath,
still chants:
“Remember,
remember,
you are both lost
and found.”
At dusk, the earth exhales.
The river carries yesterday’s light.
I stand where two trees forget themselves,
their leaves humming with quiet urgency.
The air sinks like a drawn breath—
The clock ticks louder
when no one is here.
Time slows.
The earth whispers beneath me,
its roots deeper than memory.
I think of all that it has held:
rain, frost,
a prophecy of trees grappling.
Tonight, I will dream of walking backward,
undoing each footprint,
until I reach the place where the stony path began,
a place the map forgot to mark,
a place that hums like the river.
Beneath the vault of heaven,
where rivers weave their silver hymns,
I wander, lost yet whole,
a vessel filled with drifting stars.
The earth, this mother,
holds me in her fragrant arms.
Her breath is the song of pines,
her voice the murmur of streams
that fall like prayers into the open sea.
Yet even now,
as twilight presses against my chest,
I hear the echo of solitude.
It stirs the wind,
it bends the grass,
it kindles the spirit of a weary heart.
It calls me by names I’ve never spoken,
words that bloom only in silence:
it carries them all,
like wind through an orchard.
Time, a whisper folded beneath the floorboards,
like the turning of leaves,
Drawing the world anew.
There is only now.
The air is heavy with waiting.
What waits?
Not the end, but the space before it.
A door opens inward,
but no one enters.
The wind moves through the room,
an unwritten sentence,
its syntax carved in dust
on the sill of a forgotten window.
What are we
but the echo of stones
worn smooth by a river
that refuses to name itself?
I carry these moments—
a sparrow’s wing,
the scrape of the moon against the horizon—
as if they might matter.
Who are we now,
in the breath between stones?
And still, the door stays open.
The wind whispers again,
this time more clearly:
“Nothing is yours,
but everything is given.”
© Thomas Deane Tucker
Thomas Deane Tucker is a humanities professor at a college on the high plains of Nebraska. He enjoys writing poetry when he has time away from lecturing and grading papers.
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