Vapor

It was a simple change.

Not unlike those birds
in the park, netted and tagged,
tossed again to the sky.

Just as air returns water to itself;
the transaction is mostly imagined
like love or grief.

But the birds knew the difference:
the before-net
and after-net selves

and I,
before the body's turning,
and after, where some prospect
of ghost lies fallow—
the cells learn to speak
only in constellations of scars.

Copyright © 2006 Lauren Mitchell All rights reserved
from Pebble Lake Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission