from the Cherokee
by Andres Rojas
What is left of crags
is as much riven inheritance
as the rough-winged swallows
buzzing the rhododendrons,
not at play, hunters on the fly
as are we all, each viridescent laurel
an axis mundi no more native
than the clouds invisible today:
what is gone could last
through anything, except
what came. That isn’t right —
what remains is what remains
always, for a certain time: water
drawn four thousand feet
downhill, a wafting keen,
dusk clear as any conscience
that does not look too far afield —
next ridgeline, state line,
halfway across to the Pacific.
Andres Rojas has an M.F.A. from the University of Florida and his poems have most recently appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, and Notre Dame Review.
A-minor 
Great stuff from an old friend. If there is such a thing as “negative space” and its use in writing, I think you have achieved it here, Andy.