I see a flock of trees towering free of branches & leaves.

It seems as if everything just reaches up, never grows horizontally. 

It is getting colder.  The sky is farther away. 

The naked, barked stems point.  I must mimic,

but when I try to grasp a cloud, nothing is there to lift.

My hair is long, but I am still.

Muscle memory begins to chime, & I yearn to elongate my hands,

but they are ghosts here among the vertical rising.

I must obey the sun, I think, like a plant,

& wait for a break in the clouds.

I want to touch where my legs were,

but I have nothing familiar left to feel with,

so I crane my peripheral vision west,

& find I have grown into the ground. 

There is an old musket bullet against my temple

here among the dirt & the shoots.

My hair goes underground, each strand a curling,

tender tendril, forcing against gravity

to take root among the grains. 

I hear the indecipherable gossip of birds.

When they fly out from the pencil sharp summits of trees,

I can see their wingspan stretching left to right.

What I cannot see is their feathers angled toward the atmosphere.

It is as if they are immune to the burden of phantoms.