Aldebaran

for M.H.


Focus, follower, your hand on the ache
where the it of your eye fell, riddled

as arrows back to their archers
shaft, even glutted by a graze;

this fallow loss is my fall,
will bear your face in my blank

overwhelmed, as only pain can
fellow itself--- barren.

Adieu

to M.H.

A flower, or face, orphic, for my oxygen
exhaled from exile:

may song suffer her echo, knelled against
supplicant’s throat, an altered prayer---

may oxeyes follow her back in mourning
knowing herself their knoll.

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.  

Dumbshow

Some fire that would show the moth
how to feel, or at least a hope,

some spark, perhaps, beginning
inside a mute’s mouth--

a man’s up in smoke
dream to become a voiceover.

It’s a film I once saw, or meant
to see, the audience given rocks

to elect the end--
pebbles that burned in our hands,

carrying the cold lips
of an echo in the stone.