Dissolution
When I lost my soul,
I was doing what comes naturally,
rolling it between my finger and thumb,
watching its fine threads sparkle in my palm,
returning feathers of sunlight
from its cloudy prison,
hefting its glinting mass
gently from hand to hand,
when a wind took it into the cool bright sky.I chased it for what seemed like miles
as it swooped down the sidewalk,
hovered momentarily above the forsythias,
shrank to a pinhead glittering
amid the swarm of angels
invisible against the blue.It finally caught in the twigs
of a tree too tall to climb,
with branches years out of reach.
It faded and unraveled into the weather.
By summer, its last filaments were an absence.Sometimes I see a shimmer
in the weave of a nest that will not fall,
an iridescence on the wings
of a bird that seems to remember my name.
©2002 F.J. Bergmann"Dissolution" appeared in Rosebud Issue 32 April 2005 and the 2002 Yahara Journal and won 3rd place in The Writer’s 2005 New Discovery contest