Voice

for M.H.


You will not remember the dream
which you derived from, found

your appetite to that fruit,
where your tooth was confined---

ache-relic of the turn
from blindness to blindness.

You were my voice then,
a surrogate idol moored by my hand

to this world, no longer
nourished by God's light

with our threshold of pain
even the needle's eye bears.

Allegory

for M.H.


Mouthsifted down to breath,
down to the silence of the Cross

conceived, sieved
through a surgeon’s glove,

under skin, under terra firma, under
archives of pain--- the two of us induced

into this purgatory
before blind Justice,

who holds a nerve like a tablet
in each hand; two roots

in which the buried
find themselves awake again.