___________________________________________

What time should echo is the thing

that lets there be no mistake in the intention,

as last worst seen, barefoot.

In the woods I left the light to walk its own path.

Like Geronimo, I made no attempt

to count my own footprints. There were none.

If these windows breathed by comparison to

the flower's breath, we would cut ourselves

on the motionless surface of the night.

As a boy, the train tracks were a way

to meditate on the strangeness of youth.

Fastened to their intrigue, somehow

they always revealed new sets of

thought-patterns, as if with a spectral analysis,

the words still, even now, linger like thorns

around my ankles.