Avoiding Darkness
(for Christina Conrad)
There is a desert in every heart
which cannot be crossed
for fear there is no end.
No shade. No resting-place.
Striving to avoid darkness,
I make a slave-dance of freedom –
toeing the air midst angels.
(Is that laughter in their wings,
or merely a semblance of weeping?)
I stumble before Death’s fiddle.
How many hands have traced
the face of Treachery,
Desire, tangled in a coverlet of night?
Each year, the dead draw nearer,
I am known to those who have gone before;
surely, those who follow will not be strangers.
The nudge of invisibility
breeds small comfort in the idleness of years.
I camp with ghosts,
chant endlessly of the lost –
an ever-changing vanishing point
beyond the ceremony of hope.