Unformed
I’ll confess something dire and name it before
It disappears,
Flowing out of my head, never itself twice.
The river keeps
Nothing as it passes. Mist-prismed elsewheres
Pour out. I know
You are there, toes mucked with the soil
Of other planets
And your bones ascendant stardust. I know I
Hear you laughing
In the Morhen’s knelling throat, between worlds,
But I cannot
Call your name in the right tongues, and I see I’ll
Never know you -
Waters keep nothing of shadowed lives,
Running over
Earth’s deafening limits, beyond the edges
Of reason where
Colours dance in shapes half-known to the living;
Pieces borrowed
From things verging over at the riverside
Whose light, like yours,
Left too bright a swell in its trembling likeness
And ran onwards
And onwards in its cathedralled expanse.
But we linger.
We are hollowed. We resonate in lost names.
We keep nothing.
