The future is a place we live together now, for lack of a better option. We are playing there like bears in the water– beautiful in a graceless absurdity; certain of our right to be here. When the mountain men appeared at first, we found them ruthless– they couldn’t see the way the world was ours to do just as we pleased with. Later (though we disagreed) you found cause for recluse up the tree line where the basin’s lost but we’ve still respite from a tangled stream and the certainty of beating an enemy at their own game. There’s a plateau like some version of a hidden kingdom edged against the plaintive granite; where the grass grows soft beneath our padded feet that here pace careful, resolute in a most affectionate witness: though we care not to collect the gods of those inventing sacrifice to spare them their conceits, we permit their pleasure in the way we walk as if the clover bends to great us; the buttercups to sate our tender tongues inventing scents like “temerity” and “honey”. Sometimes I forget you’re real while I am staring at the sky, but I remember you as the grunt at roots of stumps you’ve turned up in all earnest and know in all my hearts that what is grown used to becomes not commonplace, but better realized in its absence. There are promises no meadow here can ever keep, just as the leaves that fall depend on time to pass the summer’s fleeting green and if by winter we uncoupled part there are no cubs coming to keep me round and thin and warm again beneath the melting cap of unavoidable sleep we both acknowledge rough, if only by the way we eat. Am I a fish on the hook or a damp and ready mischief we’ve been making as if it could become us–? I am trembling now, but we’ve been warned that time’s run out, and “now” is hard to keep in any quarter.