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# Elements / Weathering Loss
- URL: https://www.fsm.ink/four-poems-for-mike/
- Published: 2021-03-23T21:21:23.000Z
- Updated: 2026-06-03T18:55:36.000Z
- Author: Emily Bowles
- Tags: Poetry, #Import 2026-08-03 09:59

*by Emily Bowles*

**Awakenings**

*For Mike Seybert*

You left behind a wake of words

like water running

away with your meaning—

a wake of words by those left

like Bishop’s keys or

Oliver’s geese circling

in your wake, the words betraying

not so much of you

as we wanted, wondered.

How your words awake in us a

wake of words, leaving

your meaning, migratory. 

  
**If I Fall on Your Trail**

I wrote my name on my shoe

for you—or because 

of you, that becausing 

a becoming, not a pair,

not a man I knew you knew

anew, a new aloneing

this loss without finding:

*I am afraid for you*

*I am afraid like you*

of unknownness (no, you—)

  
**Witchweeds**

Everything I touch turns to you

as if in flowering a witchweed

which we

do not know how to grow

we

do not know how to grow

morning glories weeping willows 

such anthropomorphizing seedings 

ceding re-

ceding. What I mean is,

everything I touch turns into you

witchery when I realize 

(I used to believe)

everything I touched,

I made made me 

 we

make each other without

knowing which flowers turn 

to you, away from me—turn

into outto onto

a sun moon whitening, 

a moon sun brightening

a withered face, lines unbending 

hermystery.

  
**Finfeathering** 

A mermaid flying frightens 

me—frighteningly, 

finfethering 

toward failure 

of magic, flighteningly freeing

 freezing: 

water unfit for sirensinging, so she

gasps for breath. 

Water unfit for breathing, a lung

filling with the wrong elements,

and fins feathering, 

into the squawkings 

of a seagull shatterbird,

shatterborn, shatterburn

star star star 

scales 

scar scar scar 

from a sharp shard 

this shadowburdening

shadowburn shadowburden shadowbird

stranded in a whether unfit—weather, 

for a birden, seegull, sea.