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Spinebow (the sadness of occlusion)
I don’t always see past the oyster days of pall,
through skeleton trees a frenzy of bones and fingers,
when I ebb into myself and my scattering flecks of hands
lacerate delicate parietes of silence (that shimmering haze
through twenty-eight miles of rain)
Deftly I succumb to the night that plummets
Like swift needles splintering my mortal core
Quickly the flame of parting flesh exhausts me,
leaves me a caul of smoke diffusing like a bruise,
a faint threnody, a breath: painted like the dawn
Still, I love the fractured smiles of juxtaposed grays,
though their song cannot echo when I’m not empty
It falls, it drowns in a river of a heart split like a claw
Carving out the sweetest sound; slipping under eyes
shut tight in the grip of ghosts and flushing memories
In my throat: a stone of solace; the enured creator
of concentricity breaking in sentient waters
Disarray, obscurity – my dusky thoughts – arcing, scattering
Into the shrouded, doleful howl of the wind
permeating the cobwebbed skin of aging retentions
NJP 10 September 2004
