War Zone

for Paul Auster

Days emptied out along the hairline
cracks where you spilled the glossy oil
where you stopped resemblance from looking,
where your thoughts, if they were thoughts,
ghost things of the mind, dream things of the night,
fell down and down to the last rock under the pile,
the final colorless span, making no sound or only
the sound that cannot be heard, without
mimic, so that it spread as if made of inky moss,
as if made from a tincture of fallen petals, of thin bloods
and thin wings of the tiniest insects, bodiless in flight,
translucent as dusk but, even so, changeless,
like the grieving of a stranger in a photograph of war.
Last line intentionally left blank.