CRIME SCENE

6 7 R C R I M E S C E N E H E N R Y W A L T E R S Ephemera the wind forms out of snow on river ice confuse me, fool me, undermine my alibis. Legible runes spelled out so plain a second ago sift into others, a logolalia of uncomposed atoms aquiver in each flake, and quarks in the atom quaking, and infinitesimal strings inside each quantum, even in that sound: flake, which once, and worlds away, was consubstantial with the flesh and pared from flay. There: gone. Ephemera . . . White runes . . . So where was I? Snow script: its piecemeal book: deforms the letter Y into a branching helix whorled around a drifting center its spin steadies: like a top skating the counter. 6 8 Y And then the eye can trace the figureeight of its felony: to have blinked aside how many motes of memory, to have forsaken what forms of change for sake of form: what dunes of quicksand shifting through the caruncle of dream, the names I might have worn had I been born a girl, or elsewhere, or in such and such a time, or under anotherworldly sign, all drifting out of constellation since having come unfinished, unforeseen from my haphazard womb. Half matter, half wave, blurred then broken, the flesh in flakes caroms from world to word and back without mistakes like an atomic clock. A hush. The wind’s gone quiet. And the skin of the river’s sleeved in indivisible white refracting through me. I’d lost track of . . . where I was. Compare a prism, throwing light on us piecemeal. What are the odds a snowflake would come to rest precisely here? And the fact of its having happened – everywhere. ...