in the swollen eve of night,
we are light trilling on boughs
and the same bird that arrives
in the morning
is the same bird that abandons us
in the evening,

half-illuminated in flight,
surrounded by the quake of the world,
i take this edge of silence
and its shine-meshed motions
propping up the shadow and defeating
it after with no hesitation, no sallow contrition, no ravening contention;
the night's tenement is the
same clout of daylight's lulled out prisoner: take honestly by saying laughter
and its meager dance frothing in the mouth, shying away into atrial flutters.

feasting in the wind, unfettered, loosely
ambling like waters set free in the vein
of the autumnal world

we've gone where nobody else went,
scared of our freedom, our reluctance to glance back at our petrified images,
willed with a different fire we didn't know our hearths possessed,

on and on, past cathedrals,
     past synagogue bells which word not
  our names, only the mornings we have
   scattered and recollected, bannering
     through our lives, separate, joining all
  that has defied their deaths,
    the unscathed flowers of the garden
and the sheen of whose eyes lost
  their youthful glint,

  on and on,
  never returning, mapping
  a labyrinth of its own.