Standing on my beached heartland,
a few hundred thousand bleached granules of sand
trickle through thick slits in my hourglass hands.

The dry-stream sands my fingers to periosteum as
my head walks the neural gallows,
last lines on the tip of the tongue.

He was a runaway circus animal,
the theme I hunted in vain.
He was my solar eclipse, my waning moon, the coastline;
he was a garden, a sculptor, an elaborate stone trellis;
he was frightened, he was in love, a philosopher without a cause;
he was Michelangelo, Camus, Akhmatova, Kant, Blake and Crane;
he’s the executioner, the brief reflection of a solitary grain
sliding down the boney hourglass
as the blindfold does the same.