whitewashed

i let slip a wisp of dream today,
pulled free and observed but a moment
when the wind whisked it from my fingers,
fluttered straight into the canyon,
crashing down, a million tons in the water.
a thousand feet below the river leapt up
to wash pure my face, never to fall back,
so it was my tears that refilled the river.

the silt was still damp
when my grief restored the river rushing,
no singular agony or specifiable torment
but a lifetime of repressed catastrophe
no longer doped clean by poppy sounds
and all the whitewashed propaganda
conjured up by a threatened ego.

this summer snowfall
was not the blanket i requested.