It’s like the damp littered forest is obfuscating my senses. The way it smells, the way you smell, running heartily down the mountain. Catch me! Catch up to me! Cranberry columbine creek. To the boughing trees where I sink: The summer sun is lemonade fade through branches cool and long. The dawn and then the dusk. East to west. Colors falling downward in the glass; sweetened syrup. And I’m a wet mess river swamp thing; algae: Salmon skin shining in the confluence of tributary creek to river, river to sea. I left you in the dust of basalt but we were already breaking; the summer sun iced lemonade, cold beer, warm wine, and water-blood. The words we loved. We drank so much we consumed each other! We carved our names into sandstone as if they would stay, as if I would stay. Bardess. Seeker. Poetess. Seeker. In the trees elf-disc comes through in grenadine. I can’t stop facing cranberry colored, crimson-basted lemonade-draining creek. Cranberry. Columbine. Creek. Beloved, you died in those sugary woods. My heart, your heart; the same creature beating. Wrapped in fat, dripping dark black blood in a trap dangled from doorway. Cranberry columbine creek. I wanted to write, but you hung your heart in the trap and had it bleed before me, as if me writing would destroy us. Somehow you knew if I was given the space to write, I would leave. Leave! Inevitable that I leave. Destroyer. Seeker. Traveler. Seeker. Mountains high and glossed. Lemons squeezed and tossed, tossed then found, lost, and bound to standing rocks beside the stream looking down, not behind, but down. At cranberry columbine creek.