Wednesday, January 30, 2008


CLOSE


How close, the sharp insistent

edge to a word that says,
Open?

My chest heaves,

slamming like a shed door in the wind.

My long shadow goes out
to meet the trucks
rumbling, reverse lights on,

who mate their ends to the loading dock.


I gather up the rough splinters
of packing crates, the bent,

shrieking nails, the corsets of rain.

I wear them all like a wedding dress
of the newly drowned.
I stitch together anything that might break
into the victim's steady handshake.

Monsters