What you Inherit

Two poems connected by escape and grounding; letting go and clinging

Inheritance of Motion

Sand holds heat longer

than skin can. You press palms

flat against the dune’s face —

not prayer. Something older.

A covenant.

The heart pulls west. Also east.

You follow tracks toward the sun,

peel off the layers of need

to reveal night.

Desire seeps into the dark.

Stars trace their secret paths

across the sky —vast and black,

loyal only to this collective of spirits,

this restless wanting.

You love like a sandstorm,

all hot and chaos,

a frantic spiral of forgetting.

How can you justify your kinship with the wind?

Or believe motion is the only mode of feeling,

forever fleeing into the burnt orange

sunset of escape.

Make me understand this tradition of leaving

inherited from lack.

Your tracks have vaporized.

They hover above sand and circumstance.

I wait between wind and witness –

the eternal hush.

Inheritance of Stillness

I wanted roots,

but I chose someone in motion —

feet always pressed toward a vanishing point,

an exit body,

shaped for escape.

Your love a holding pattern that couldn’t land.

Then he arrived —

white hot and screaming,

a weather system with no warning.

He floated weightless inside me, then

dragged into gravity, a cold, dry world.

His tiny hands felt for me

before he saw or understood.

Mother was his planet.

His red-faced screams shredded me,

squirming against the swaddle —

his rage felt familiar.

His eyes anchored my feet.

The wind whipped

outside.

My life dropped deep —

a free fall to stop and stay.

Check out the poetry and essays in my main substack, States of Matter.