Facing It

The tears fade in

the screaming inside howling brick.

It is our cancer

swirling around,

stone, flesh and home.

Our history is in its eye,

our profile in this wild night of carnage

slouching towards mornings. We turn

away and the brick frees us.

We turn back and are inside

our granite selves forming in the sculpting wind,

erring in the perfect sad light,

different, broken-whole.

Our names are erased from brick,

letters spreading like smoke

in the all defining wind.

It drops in the field of its birth,

a flash in the silent mud and clay.

It shimmers on my wife’s white blouse,

and when she walks away,

settles in memory.

The wind chisels a robin

falling, dying in my stare.

The cloud of my neighbor

floats towards me, pale eyes

trying to define me

but I am not a window.

Her face is lost in the brick

and the wind erases her,

the street, their signs,

the names of those in houses behind.

 

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