More than a lost night,
                   heavy as old cloth,
                   blind as an uncaged wind,

rather a space where all the stars
                  are lower than down,
                  the moon drifts
                  through arcs of frost.

The high masts along the road
                 are crowned with sodium light,
                 a camp like the edge of a prison,
                 a string of cruel pearls.

This is how I suffer
                 from that which I seek,
                 alone in the changed dark.

A night-train passes, but at a distance.

Looking over the pale fields
and old woods, I recognise
                          this can not be
                          the consequence of birth,

more a late push under winter mud,
as if I am as thin as cardboard,
                          one of no depth,
                          desolate as sleet.

An afternoon of dark flowers.
Werner told me,
                            there were bad men in flight.
Then we sat in a broken circle,
                            as if the air was forbidden
                            with stopped time,
                            the room choked with dust.

Suddenly, lights from a car outside.
Ghosts on a wooden floor,
created by a window and snow.
This is the way you leave the world.

Step aside, slightly,
                    from a beach beside
                    cold moving water.

A sighting in rain,
                    hooked on a line,
                    empty as a fallen bell,
                    an open window, opaque.

If I am distant to myself
                   I am lost, aware
                   of room, the soft crunch of shingle.

Steps of a known stranger, a shell.

The threatening nature of
                             artificial objects,
                             not snow dropping from pines,
                             nor windows shattered with frost

but the flight of keys and bells,
                            and all that begs for
                            subtle asides,
                            all that is malevolent for this,

all that falls,
                     that disobeys my hands,
                     those white apes mapped
                     with the views of the Via Dolorosa

all things that make my dry box spin,

my body does not follow me,
                     I often seem to look
                     over my shoulder

at the dark detective of age.

An index of first growth,
                 bound in curled leaf,
                 a glossary of shadow

over the deep cruched floor
                of cone and splinter, of spruce.
                Coda ; the glass

of silence is often broken.
                lost words seek
                the brown narrative of winter,

the best time
              to read the trees, the text.