Historical Graffiti #4 by Hannah Rodabaugh

Sometimes you destroy what you love. You sign your name on the world around you. You mark it until every flower, its every petal, is stained with your name. The icy pink orchid is patterned with your voice like grainy lines of Morse. The birds wear your colors. You’re the first dawn trembling with red-gold light, the first word spoken inside the first voice, the stars’ slow movement eclipsed by your skin, the moon’s slick pattern of slanted light smearing the earth beneath you. You’re everywhere, and the world is too small for you. You’re everywhere, and you’re grasping onto the one thing you can crawl inside of. You write it down. Everywhere the earth fills up with naming like the cold scent from underneath the cedar limbs. You know each separate color, each tiny part, now that you’ve classified it, given it a tiny heart to beat. Still the earth keeps leaving you behind; it keeps replacing you. You’re buried or eroded by time’s slow sickle. The pattern of cruelty is to give you a creation that also removes you, how memory always repairs. Your efforts to make a deep impression goes unrewarded. The future won’t look at you with the same eyes or won’t look at you at all.

Photo by Dave Schumaker via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

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Hannah Rodabaugh holds an MA from Miami University and an MFA from Naropa University. She is the author of three chapbooks, including We Don't Bury Our Dead When Our Dead Are Animals, a collection of ecological elegies. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Indianapolis Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Camas Magazine, Horse Less Review, K’in Literary Journal, and elsewhere. She’s been an Artist-in-Residence for the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service. She teaches English at Boise State University and writing at The Cabin Idaho, Idaho’s only literary center. Her website is: www.hannahrodabaugh.com