Heart beats me down the track,
through seasons dressed in wallpaper,
in conversations of manicured echoes,
days of trembling windows;
lives winding down in covered-up mirrors,
blood filling me up to the last drop,
just like Maxwell House Coffee;
Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham stretching his longevity,
my eyes sore before me,
my ears listening for the mountains

A younger version of this self-consciousness
plays the recorder
in a bathroom recollection that lasts

Silver the Cat scratches the bedroom door
of the present,
meowing to me to let him in,
while the pen becomes a ballet dancer in front of me
in a ferocious fairytale; a Nurejev become inky;
a Rite of Spring right-of-way pencilized ahead;
everything's entirety flung out in a winding plover track
in the sand of an islet in Lake Saimaa in Karelia 1985