Revenant

This week in one of my workshops we used random dictionary words for prompts. Glory used the word Revenant, and I have been thinking of that word ever since. Dictionary.com defines it as: a person who returns. / a person who returns as a spirit after death; ghost. October is full of ghosts. I say this facetiously, but with a hint of seriousness for a time of year that seems to dig up a lot of memories for people. this has been evident in my writing groups this month and in my own writing. Here is Glory’s beautiful piece and one of mine. Cheers to learning to live (and dare I say thrive?) with our ghosts.

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Revenant

Nothing here should remind me of you. It was Fall when we fell, and leaves turn purple and deeper shades of green here, not yellow or burnt sienna or colors of the sunset fading. The temperature doesn’t oscillate with seasons rainy or dry, we remain the same, tied to the equator heat. I never see my breath fog the air in the marriage of early light and wind chill. But when we hide away in the night and the wind takes the electricity from me, promising rain, you appear. In the place of waiting, knowing the rain will bring you near, I hold my breath. You creep in, calling out to who I used to be, asking her to reappear. A revenant of years past, I was never superstitious until I met your memory in the rain.

-Glory Guy

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Dear Michael, I Think You’re Wrong

There are some interior muscles
that are so tender yet
so hard and tense and bruised
and unwilling to heal

there are some mountains that insist on interrupting
long stretches of plains

there are some storms right there hanging
over a soft and slow summer evening
purple and ready
just as you set your chairs out on the lawn
to talk in the darkening dusk

there are some fingernails that grow in crooked and irregular
no matter how many times you file and trim and forget
it will grow back just the same way
with the same strange dip and groove and angle

and it becomes easy for me to believe what you said:
that people don’t really change
that hardness stays hard
and wounds only deepen

yet

here is what I have witnessed:
people rise and fight and forgive and try and fail
and try and fail again
and then this miracle happens:
one foggy morning
they wake up
still rubbing their eyes but deciding
and I think that is the hinge word: deciding

to file that nail before it annoys them
and stretch the sore muscles before they run
to walk around the mountain instead of right into it
and even
to stare up into that purple sky
and let it pass right over the top of them
while they watch, laughing
from the porch

-Alli Rogers Dahlgren