Niche soliloquy

musing on architecture.

There is always a question of time. It resides
in our need for shelter to survive.
Your next breath rises and

drops into the ceramic fruitbowl. It lies
there among red apples,
sprung up on trees even after houses
fell. We've heard the story,
we've dipped off our own shelf.

You are sitting on a rock.
Waiting for cicadas.

For the shapes cicada shells make when folded,
carefully so as not to crush, as if
they are never meant to touch the ground again,
as if it's all a kind of seam
 

and there aren't more than two
ways to make a roof. The shell of a
cicada helps illustrate the size of a large rock.
You say that and see
 

all the small jealousies
surfacing, wanting, too, to be alive but
in no hurry, eluding human scale to hover
around your tartan scarf.
 

It is late
and when the blood orange sun lands
precisely in the centre
of the red-haired woman's palm
we will smell the earth's crust unfolding
in our own palms: it will be thick with rain,

the kind of rain which hangs,
in tatters, in dawn's early light
on the wrinkled section of the window pane, wondering
is this my niche? or is this just some dent? never
knowing that our art could help take longevity
to the people but only if they had flowers
on the table, inside, where the bent barely matters
anymore, where even timber is scored

and folded. I bend,
put my head on your lap.
From here we can see the blurry edge,
the lit up windows of the farm house,
and how cidadas hope
only to survive themselves.