Tag Archives: shadow

Sonnet

what prize did you hope to hold in those smooth
hands for the plan sketched in cloud and unbuilt—
what melody might have flown forth if you
freed yourself from petty politics of
the boardroom and tested those scrawny wings—
but you sat with a job safe as socks and
a single number near the cold solstice

now in the damp the aches where you bend while
those black glacier teeth topple in tepid
tea you mumble to the cat it wasn’t
all bad these bloody feet could still march this
hand salute the lurking shadow who smiles
at the coughing cubicle dwellers soon
to be churned into cheap fertilizer

when we meet at which cafe or museum shop
I will be all smiles and jokes but looking
left and right too often as though some shadow
but what are you watching these days what post
made you rage? this black mud around my feet
never mind I see your shoes are dark as well
but why don’t we talk about dessert instead
of the world war of the week or even
this flattening heat you say you saw something
that reminded you of something and something
something


so leaves a ghost
still hungry that refuses to tip

it should be more than cotton
candy though I lack
a recipe my hands have just
this tiny pen filled with
latency and the ladder is rotten

how many more nights

the sun bobs up and down
I look the other way that burning
you say it’s the weekend well why
not warp the mirror a little more

I can’t remember
why I entered this race

and I want to go to war with
each slender shadow

my feet must be cut from my shoes as soon

as the sun returns some color to those skulls

from under a rock hear me sing and walk on

other people’s postcards

and the problems you carried from home but
with new hats in the shop they said you
must visit after something muttered
about the mountain air some vista or

chirps back and forth in brightening dark cold coffee

though later and once the music mercifully
stopped and after the little chapel was
broken down and the beams
turned into pens for disappointed
tourists the sound of the little fountain
carried us
away

if we knew where we might go the precious
shell the shadow inside