So Fast Away

Think hands, think mouth, think eyes. Those pieces floating
in their stream of thought. That they might cohere and be a life,
life lived, in one room or another, footfall and laughter,
signs over doorways, moving air. That the mouth might speak,
the eyes watch, the ears listen. Listen to each paraphrase,
see the wind-threaded passagings, the errors like pathways
leading to a door, what door? That the tongue remember the taste
of salt, the ears the sweep of wind and rain, mice clawing
at the walls. Everything's blowing away so fast.
So fast away. Myself away. Think hands, think mouth, think eyes,
how silent the unbecoming is, how silent the unraveling. So much
of thinking happens in the light's receding, the fade-out into black,
the I was there and then I wasn't there-I remember
that spire, that roof, that bell-and now I'm here.
As if for a reason. Fade to black. Fade slowly now to black.
And the mouth says at night, when no one hears,
I loved the blown pages, the torn ones, they were the only ones
I loved. The scatterings in them, the silences still seeding
them, the gaps and rottings, terrain of disappearances,
of presences half-caught and fleeing, words ripped
as if lightning had scorched them, claimed them for its own.
These hands and eyes. Soft mouth that spoke and couldn't speak.
Hands that touched and didn’t touch. Eyes that hungered and withstood,
all over the sensitized surfaces, the surfaces of things keenly layered,
undeluded. The love of structure and the love of wind. At night thinking
scatterings
and eyes. Thinking lightning and surfaces and fade. It’s black, it is to dark
though traceries of light are still adrift in this somewhere, scatter-shot and hidden.
When no one can hear. When touched. When scattered. When hidden. When
watched.