I try on silence like clothes that bear your scent. The rooms split, walls from ceilings, unfold, infer. Nothing but the shattering left. I am lying on the bed that sinks into a river. Water moves over me now down to the mouth.
All tributaries wash out.
The windows are too small for the sky in this house. Amber , she intones, and repeats, amber . Neither luminescent fault-spiked caramel nor silent, opaque coffee grounds, these crisp stars in night sky draw my eye, my sight slightly marbled by desire. I thought I'd lost like an old skin, a lover set beside me in silver, to whom I was bound and released, as from a watery deep brown. I've climbed to err on autumn earth upon a crust of papery leaves and spoken what I must, yet conversations never end when words wound inside begin to surface through agents like developing prints, the way history seeps into the present hour with purposes and meanings long turned sour.