The Rustle of Hemlock

I don’t know what I’m supposed to wantfrom this, my stagnant sea of days,the endless hours I must part withbreath and breath and breath, or elsebe silent in, and drown, these nights,when lost thoughts rise as flotsamto the surface of the mind and scrapemy skull like waves slowly devouring a cliff,the months when light resumes its roostto groom a thinning plumage, and our earth,this whole frayed edge of space,seems postscript to a perfect nothingness,some failed form. Each day redoesthe vast undoing of the last: the sunextinguished, stars dissolved, a fieldtangled in frost, and in between, just dreams,more shadows, snow falling on snow,a boy leading a tame bear on a leashalong a ditch, an empty silo on a distant hill,the cracked, off-key sonata of the moonwhose cadences could make one fall in lovewith doubt and dust and madness and despair,the soil tinged pink from wars upstream,a river on whose currents, as if from my arms,the last few leaves slip silently away.