What is this? It feels vaguely familiar.
Is this Solomon's "Noonday Demon"
establishing residence again?
Melancholy? The dejection
of a scolded child?

I am carrying my sadder twin
with me wherever I go.
My shadow has finally caught
up with me after a long while.
Like an unloved cousin, it has
tailed me all day long.

Coming close enough to murmur
in my ear. What it is saying is
unintelligible—whispered sibilant half tones.
The lamentations of dying mollusks
stranded along the sunbaked shoreline.
The grieving call of an un-mothered fawn.

What can be done? Is there anything that
should be done? Are we in danger here?
Is it possible we could drown together?
The two of us bound as one like
Paolo and Francesca in Dante's underworld.

Me, making the motions of trying to live a life;
it doing the only thing it knows how to do—
clutch my shirtsleeve and groan in tune
with the cicada’s last few bootless
serenades to the empty woods.