Jade Succulent

With daylight getting dirty
and people walking home through the city park,

fragments of time
are seized in the spill of language

under a plane tree’s chaotic abandon. In the dusk

rows of jade succulent pallor
appear profanely lit

like a photographic negative — it’s the same in memory’s dark terrain where kindling embers constitute a mourning song

or an unfinished poem,
to burn and renew at the same time.

Without this redemptive passage the past has no refrain

and you and I might cease to speak in the light of these autumnal fires.

Deborah Staines