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