Traces

Traces
David C. Kopaska-Merkel

Long years our journey,
ending here, a land of purple sunrise,
wild alien grasses nodding their sage heads,
fluttery things, hoppers, crawlers,
good old O2 and CO2,
and we, blinking behind shades,
feeling of the air with ship-tanned fingers,
and you, rumor coming to us in the wind.

We felt you in the night,
under undisclosed constellations,
tasted your ululations across the miles,
behind wooded corners,
lurking at the brink of sleep,
in the embers of sun blink,
we found you,
and you found us.

You crammed so many inside of you.
Our boundaries dissolved,
dross eliminated,
juicy bits gone to feed your young,
and the patina of us,
our whiff of not-of-this-world,
plating your alimentary invaginae,
that, and, unto the generations,
our repurposed blueprints, bending your corpus
to evolution's will.