Here, airy spaces press against the half-ascended canyon,
where I, the lone man, sit with one bird's song for my companion.
Her fluted warble rings and resonates in hollow spaces,
where nesting unbirthed life may spring still further avian graces.
I, the lone man, here to cup the water off these rocks.
High and low alone, a scion of extinguished flocks.
Our once idyllic parable now winding to its end,
because this salted Earth provides no soil which to tend.
This arbored chasm rolling lush across the green divide,
where banks of fog and cumulus have formed the other side,
and I, the lone man, looking out from their same sunlit height:
twained like vaporous kindred, formed in love and bathed in light.
This lone man's self must now exchange a heavy toll,
for full within this canyon beams the shining substance of my soul.
But father: blue, empyrean. Verdant mother, creche of loam -
faultless we, becoming nameless: other men unmake our home.
Once above the cloudbank, with the treeline far below,
my mind turns towards the valleys where the muter creatures grow.
And as the thrush goes silent, drowned in unknown insects' drone,
I, the lone man, wonder - was that bird's soft song my own?