One Last Breeze

One Last Breeze
  

It sneaks under the threshold of the long shut door,
over the shedding skin of peeling wallpaper,
past the dusty spines of now unread books—
turning pages no one meant to leave,
step less, voice less— a  curious breeze.

It seeks the crack in the window—
to leave this vault of knowledge behind—
these graves beyond, both named and unknown—
all these heavy stones and plastic flowers in modular vases,
holding on too long, that stymie its hillside rise.  
 
Past the old  chapel with the roof collapsed,
the candles drowned in decades of melted wax,
the hymnals with their unsung “Abide With Me-s”,
the prayers in Holy Texts never to be chanted,
the rusty Jesus unable to ascend the muck beneath.

It whips around the giant mall shuttered for the night,
its  frozen escalators, the echoes of Muzak, 
the phantasmagoria of impaled  mannequins 
needing a steel rod to stay erect 
in the arctic of the air conditioning.  

Past the long steel buildings that 
use to have people huddling within them
speaking the city’s now lost language—pass all 
the little houses with broken windows spelling nothing—

pausing only briefly to cough out brick dust,
to mourn for but a second for the chalk galaxies
their children once drew,  to ponder the schematics
of orbiting satellites that will now crash
without their humans to course correct them.

This breeze will unfurl itself through
the cold scaffolds of their once intentions,
pass the comets hurling in silence,
into a Milky Way folding into itself—
a forgotten letter slipped between stars.

In that great collapsing hush,  
the wind will finally break,  
stop, become, lose every-
thing, it ever, 
touched.