Seraphim

looking back i call the shapes we made
radical, an abstraction of birds—

because i cannot bear to just let them be.
maybe memories are not

to be tampered with, just as you do not touch
the venerable, the way

you do not hold an open wire (your name

spoken from myself to myself
to the sky). remembering is like the snow

i mean: even when i shouldn’t be,

i am surprised. like seeing children in it, or squirrels
across a barren parking lot. really, testimony is beside the point:

like a tree that falls in the woods, there are, everywhere,
simple shapes of you

that make things happen—
even when i’m not there for them.

they go on, subatomically.
there’s a propulsion to this feeling

of losing you: arm to snow to wing, the way age follows
forgetting being young. your color

and your voice too—light cannot move
a pendulum and yet it moves me. remember tethered motions

in the snow as if to fly. even in dreams,
the most essential quality of being

a bird has always been flight—
but this is an ideation of no bird really and is only

an obsession of the wingless: if a bird reasons with moonlight
the way i do with myself every night—

if it knows the air as holy—of the rapture of being carried,
coolly, to an underpass to escape the snow—

                                     i am saying if a bird sees as i can see
the rime-ensilvered window where i often stand alone—

if it sees things not only for what they are
but what they disclose—

surely then it cares for wings like i care for walking home,
and must know
as any being who has ever felt fire and ice

knows—as you and i know—what is life

and what is limbic. when a look
is merely expressionistic—what is feather

what is hinge and what is half-platonic form—
cast here in this place where once, together, we moved the snow.



From Games for Children (Milkweed Editions). Copyright © 2025 by Keith S. Wilson. Reprinted with permisison.