At Dusk

The woods hold their breath under low sun.

My boots press the moss as if the earth might remember my weight.

The air coils around my chest, tight and damp,

and every step hums through my bones like a bell

that cannot be silenced.

I track what is never mine to take.

It slips through the space between thought and limb,

leaving the skin tingling, the heart hammering,

a river of heat beneath my ribs.

I feel it in my fingers, in the curl of my spine,

a pull of longing I cannot name,

a presence that folds itself around my pulse.

Sometimes it is there, radiant and cruel,

its shape a tremor in the corner of my eye.

I lunge and grasp only shadow.

The wind presses against my throat,

the ground yawns beneath my feet,

and the ache of wanting fills my chest until it aches like stone.

Other times it yields.

I hold it briefly.

Its weight hums in my palms,

burning like remembrance,

a spark that rattles through my marrow.

Even then, it dissolves into the sinews of the world,

leaving my body hollow and heavy,

its heat a lingering ghost inside me.

The hunt is not for what is caught.

It is for the fire pressed into flesh,

for the surge in the belly that screams without voice,

for the pulse that marks the bones as mine.

It is for the knowledge that desire shapes the world

even when the world bends away.

I return through the forest at night,

legs stiff, lungs heavy, blood thrumming in my temples,

and the wind curls around me like a tongue,

whispering of other paths,

other forms of pursuit,

and I know I will walk them all,

and I will carry the hunger through every sinew,

because the chase itself is the oracle,

and the fire in the body is the only proof

that the world remembers me at all.