The possibilities are perched and overwhelming with their weight
the withered autumn branches of my street. Whining sinew of my mind
breaks off and flutters down, like leaves from life's misbegotten tree,
a petal or a timid accusation.
What now am I left holding here-- vulture feathers or sapling leaves?
That girl, with tufts here and there, dropped each quill as an embossed coin, effaced
by intrepid maids vacuuming my room of cloistered couches since
soiled by madam president during isolated summit which won't convene again, her golden
gown of rues has not a stitch of fabric for a single pocket more-- sloughing brittle currency under cushions
like Fall foliage under conscious footsteps striding in constraints of time.
She picks that soggy garment from the cleaners' with the sideways background ringing of
mistrust, apprehending
silenced, patient voices; detached from their seams with dis-acknowledgment--
the dress, comes by on the carousel and
fingers her feathers with its motion.
They're washed with him, her feathers and the dress-- shored up by late summertime’s ebbing
flood that year.
Each gust eddied unaccounted toward the beach our circumstance.
What held intact the branch of life and plucked that chord for dancing in the night?
The self-same vibration that severed from the soil his trunk, which was the ship's ballast, with the adz, my will, my want
and hopeful mooring --
cast and sunk, thus.
Sound waves clashing with our spinning crystal surface of wisping nodes
plunge now beneath themselves-- frail, flaxen and woven with water.
Held out near Tyre's port a scanty mast,
thought out for catching air; forfeited this vacuous, unstable mole', their bottle
poured on water to make earth, which swells as moistrous and abridged
as a musty vestule, corked and knotted in the wind.
Encased through sanction, hold and curiosity--
the tine rubbed and singeing, loosed you from me. Those brazen beads, sand percolating, lie with us.
We are now misrepresented; sniffling as sows after the trough who root.
The woman-leaves let will be known-- to dry up and disavow
their lecherous beauty by shriveling in the tepid sun of
late September. Does too, the feather-man eviscerate the model of time
in his way of losing each and every granule
that is the ground which swells with frozen rain 'til
Spring, then thaws and flies away. Or was it
their dainty, dizzied rose petal, suckling smog from sky since birth that has weather-worn
their gowns sheer silver, freshly hewn anew, by being ripped and pressed about
which came to stifle thoughtless dew?