You’ve bailed
on your watery world
and are screaming now
in the bird-soaked air.
You’ve bailed
on your watery world
and are screaming now
in the bird-soaked air.
In a crayon sky of midnight blue.
You turn white
at the sight
of his teeth.
He came to me hang-dog,
sat down on the porch
of the little cabin I had.
Was there anything for
the misty trail and blank diffusion,
the locked-out midlife
and dry, throat-clearing
apology for not having done
– what?
He didn’t even know,
only that it was bad.
And what did I have
to offer? Nothing but
my own head hung,
the cracked and weathered grain
of the planks under my feet,
and the assumption that I wouldn’t
be in his shoes
twenty years hence.
You have held me to this earth.
I am no projectile,
no space-junk flying.
She had, surprisingly, not
the perfect flaw
of a few fine lines –
a hairline crack
in Delftware –
but that more pronounced blemish,
a varicose vein.
Or, as one once put it,
a very-close vein,
very close to you and me.