particles
of light through darkness fall—
drift
and descend like night snow,
glittering
and ghosted with the dust
of
frozen, dead-drowned stars—
leaving behind dry, salt-stinging burns;
trails of
tears from oceans emptied,
of all but the debris
of cold-tumbled stone—
chilled
sand fragments that fill
the
hollow spaces within
the
hourglass that is me—
slivers
of time gouged out,
cuts
cloaked in a wintry wall of fog
lit
by the decaying scythe of moon—
too
frail to slash the icy heavens
and
free me from the grasp of understanding,
permitting
escape from this memory of scoured skin
