The village is a field of fireflies.
At night, laughing in soft tunes, candles giggle to life
while shadows rub up against ancient alabaster stone.
The air is oregano, heat is roman, and clouds are leaves of sage.
In summer, breezes smell like seafoam and Egyptian blue.
Like honey, dew spills through streets towards
vineyards bathed in hills of sunlight,
that taste salty, or fresh as brick-oven bread.
Or maybe the village is starlight against dunes,
the color of scorpion stings. Dust is made of camel sweat
and a caravan’s daydreams. Minarets adorned with carvings.
Kings collect jars of gold-powder, bright like
edges of clouds at sunset, trapped in glass designed by a man
with limestone bones, who melted sand into puffed air. Orbs gush out
like bubbles tucked into rivers nearby, stopping the desert
from dying; lining it’s path with wet clay.
Or perhaps the village is a pond of festering lichen. Where brooks
scatter melodies through sod so music gets jammed under pastures
of sheep, bleating out smells of the dead, entombed in shepherd-trod soil.
Ribbits leap from marshes to churchyards,
there, trees at lawn’s edges are like towering
antiques, grandfather clocks, whose bark feels rigid,
like the way locals talk and pray at Sunday mass while
houses all paint themselves pepper gray in the fog.
Or the village is a path in snow, and wind is always
an owl, hooting against frigid valleys, echoing off cobble,
rousing avalanches that churn town edges into butter.
Chimney soot tastes like hot stew there, the color white
always smells like pine, and chocolates. White even has a sound
sometimes, close to clattering of elk hooves and tolls from church bells.
Some say the village is a crane in mid-flight.
Its houses dangle power, serenity dips across mountainsides.
Bamboo engulfs terracotta sloped towards tilling in paddy fields;
curvatures of the world are intricate patterns and the taste of
ginger feels wonderful against your feet as you dunk them in the local koi pond.
There, fish move like Taoist spirits and flowers meditate in the evening.
Or possibly the village is blankness that’s seeping into this ink;
are dreams, drops of imagination, that have not rained down
onto this page yet.
Just maybe, the village is making a home out of you,
nestled near the fireplace of your heart’s longing,
looking out to that village you once ran fingers through,
smelled, hummed to, and tasted, if for only a moment,
but have not yet found.
