The Snow. The Train. The Door.

For someone who has really been "on the beam" lately...

Your face, that cannot keep
its secrets, that ever must
stay secret, a blue boy's
black and white -
an ageless child
without a line you are
despite the wrinkles folding down
your verse as for the winter,
as for the last time.

Your poet's eyes, refracting light
and emptied out of all but poet
pain - that shock at seeing,
that curse at being
free and beautiful
beyond.

Your poet's voice
reciting legal briefs, betrayed by
just a quaver
in the reed from being
wholly
disembodied.
There's barely a mask - there -
emotion has all turned
to vapor, which no one dares
to prove is there.

You've found that place
where the glued unspools,
the fixed unsticks, the world
of you and me collapses
at your eyebrows, and you
must pick - the rhythm - up
with words imprisoned
in their heartache,
the only things still free
beyond the skull,
those last tobacco plugs
not price-tagged by the white man,
those last unnoticed flights
across the Fairborn plains
before the world believed
that it could fly.

There's too much distance - none.
You speak for me - succinctly.
I turn my ears for you - hear words
you cannot use.