Pose

In another life I would tell myself it is not me,
spare the audience the question of what he saw
or did to axe his head, to ask, instead, his hand
skewer my skull, and offer
the face before its maker a different angle.

Paradiso

Nearness--- who has lost his eyes and his feet
can enter the other world, can feel the warmth of it
bearing against his body as a knowledge half-understood,

understanding only that he’s come to an end,
or the purgatory of ends, always in a language,
which knows nothing of him.

Hers was the wound that lost him to the wandering,
shut out--- an eye before light, given over
to the world of pure gesture as a body immersed in water,

but if he could take himself by the hand he would know
the same pity for the damned in which the murderer
returns to sing the requiem.

Magnificat

for M.H.

It is not your face to emerge through the door, nor 

your voice yet to stricken my day with its toll,

and, till then, not to you to whom I offer
my animal semblance of song,  my howl, 

bearing not the matter of its lament

to magnify, the fact of its master's tongue---

therefore I pause here, dumb and terrified, 

though you still seem a dreamy proximity,

knowing tomorrow would wake me
in fire, if you deigned enter my day. 

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.