Sonnet Last
The evening sun is going—what else?—down.
(Down, Galileo; down.) The moon is not.
A rook—is it?—explores a vacant lot.
Curtseys for flight. Its take-off is a frown.
A tall weed—mullein?—be precise—turns brown.
Going to seed, bent gutter-wise, to rot.
Should I resent each liver-coloured spot?
I twirl my pencil for an abstract noun.
But none is right. Prefixed, they move ahead,
In certitude, where I would rather stall.
I would not—would I?—leap and risk a fall.
I add a comma—or a dash—instead,
Then with a new resolve erase each line,
Leaving an imprint only, of design.
Unravelling
A drop, a dab
of something
used to stop the thread
as it began
to come undone.
Now she wears none.
Does anyone?
Do they even exist?
A list.
She should have made a list
of all that’s gone.
How else hold on?
And if not gone,
then wobbly, shaky, from
that broken rung.
Her mind for one,
where concepts
have become
so hard to find.
Words hide, collide
and trick her tongue.
Stocking, she says. Nylons.
But what comes out
is not even a near rhyme:
aeons. An open sea of time.
She floats, for now.
One day, she knows,
the weave will be so worn
that she will drown,
each tear taking her
further, ever further, down.