i walked the levee that
separated the marsh and the river.

a cold front migrating,
not unpleasant,
clouded dense gray,
hardly a call to the winter that
must follow, rather an invitation.

bands of southward fowl
had settle over night,
the sound of them
carried on the wind,
audible a mile below the ditches
i walked towards.

hoping to list, blue teal, scaup,
mallard, canada, red head
and ring necked,
and not a hundred yards away,
one peregrine over head.

at the sound
of my approach,
unseen below the lip of the levee,
ten thousand birds
of a dozen different stripes
took to flight, heaving to the sky,
as if the earth had exploded before me
and for minutes,
great groups departed noisy,
again and again
until the marsh fell quiet.

and there was little remaining
but scattered feathers
floating on the still waters.

It begins not as a wave but as a weight. A constant press against the clay and stone.
the silent seep of doubt of the days that pile and turn my resolve to dust.
I hold. I pack the need with desperate hands, Each thought a sandbag against the rising deep,
And I feel the tremor cross the shifting lands where wakefulness refuses me my sleep.
This wall I built was meant to channel, hold,
and restrain.
But the pressure finds the flaw and my cracks.
The unseen faults that run right through my core; whispering in a language of black and endless water, “You can hold no more.”
A sound then– not a crash. A shudder from the foundation of the soul.
Then, the wet world, once held back, pours through the breach, assuming full control over my sanity.
No more the fight of muscle, will, or mind; the current takes the pieces of the wall and shows resistance to be deaf and blind,
As it beings it’s unforgiving thrall.
I am dissolved. “rearranged”
A mineral scattered in a furious sea.
There is no single solid part of the Chaos is not in me.
It is me.
A brackish tide where I once stood apart.
The Levee breaks to set the water free and drown the map of my own breaking heart.