1

Cold grass sways their bold necks,
indifferent to the season’s grim tale,
too short to be told more than once
a long, unsteady night.

The sounding drums of war.
Bleeding, bleeding…
The reckoning of days.
The hollow eye.

A bird above the barren froth.

Grass in crystal silence,
calling no more.
Families and trees, all gone.

Fathers long before us
waited for their turn to fill the gap.
The sun in a sea of salt.

Seep through weeping autumn
with gales and gusts,
with weird tools of dark mystery.

The old man hears bells of sunken ships
calling in a mist called memory
if there was a book of codes.

Thrusts of pain spears the old man’s hope
of ever joining joy’s magical
master switch
with its ascendance
into a clear cerulean forever.

“Speak you bloody tongue
of all that matters;
speak of all things unsaid,
unheard of amongst beasts,
hovering in halls as yet
unmeasured by eyes.”

Leaves of old age fold,
as they should and must,
soaked soil
knows the downward
direction,
the falling spells his name.

This he knows,
that in between this
and what really goes on
there are eyes
dying to get closer.

Driven by a heavy toll
chimney sweeps might allow,
the old man forges day’s insanity
into the one sword
cold nights insist upon.

Never promised by tomorrow,
his scarecrow fingers beckon.
Mortally wounded
he falls short at midnight.

Once milky skin
embraced his dreams
with a warm anxiety,
gulls hung above the sea.

He is bruised remains,
eyes falling, leaves.
Earth’s dark, exhausted bowl
carries his tenderness.

Dreams fill his days,
sleep erases all hope;
a sullen mound, even more earth.
The wind crawls
like a quiet sarcoma patient
over grassy hills in desperation,
hollering at midnight
with an intent beyond the stars:

“Leave me not to time’s device,
to the sound of seashells on slabs;
let gentle perish be my hollow mass,
all my broken feet will know.”

Measuring all dark hills
a cerulean horizon commences.
The old man purges the passing
with one word
and leaps at wind’s revision from trees
that take and give him different eyes.

Memories of an old town
move through wet woods
in bare November’s gaze.

Supple ice rolls across hills,
dares the thought to see
hidden waves
of lost childhood summers.

Clean, white water once
ran transparent
under these stones;
feathery ferns called
for a viridian indulgence;
birds hid in green, soporific shadows.
Clear chlorophyll
rolled like dark thunder.