You are leaning
You are leaning against a tree, a day already pooled around your feet in the hydrated dust pooling square in a cut out of the sidewalk. Your feet are slightly below the surface of the water and the reflection of your ankles shimmers out of the glowing submerged skin. You are stacked up from deep in the purity of the reflection out into the sweat and panting of the air. You are nervous where you have stopped. Stillness unsettles you. You are on display. The thick light of the rainstorm wraps you in a parted curtain, draped forever into the ocean and the desert with you at the center. You are the only thing forever, filled with empty sky and tired dessication. The afternoon expands, a great unbounded room with spots of inhabitability, a lamplight marking stations of the narrative threaded out for objects that coast down sand dunes in lightning storms, and wait, staring into your reflection for disconcerting stretches then leaning backward, heaving up your chest and grasping the tree with fingers laced behind your head, opening your body wide and rigidly scanning the northern sky for a pass in the hills across the rose stucco walls of my apartment block. The water runs across your upturned face in a thin caul, it steams. These afternoons looking cold and steel are vast and hot. Your face is colourless. The allusions to features are rigid and uninspired and frequently absent. Any encrustation of detail on your skin is unimportant. That you are there, somewhat physical, is obvious. You have a frail heaviness that rustles the air around you and the breeze diverts in an empty envelope around your body. You could fall over and the upright doldrum would linger. The vision of you lingers. You fill space elementally. You have no charge, my skin, my life could paint over you and equilibrium would be sustained.