Loss is days
passing,
the traction of years deflating
the vertical
so that a man, once a pearl in a dark mouth,
becomes sound’s flat plane.
The beating heart is corrosion,
scattering leaves,
butterflies, leaves.
Each mumbling moment.
Each frozen, irretrievable One.
Headlines could be the only things that matter;
the rest is just flesh, flow,
proliferation.
This sense that everything’s
the same and what I see – in the way
a tree emerges or an emu speeds – are the tips
of the freezing.
How to keep pace with the sun?
Never to falter. To be a cat curled
in the corner of a doorway, smiling dreamily.
Can the dream of shade
moving further out across the grass
ever be reconciled
with this tightening stiff of the gut?
On that note, how to follow a poet’s letters
to the memories of childhood
while fixated
upon the streaked darkness, through which
I perpetually, always
without seeing, fall?