A rustle in the thistle
and crabgrassy hay wayside
of my step makes me stop
to peer into the winter thicket—
few of flower but full
of line and crosshatched dash.
Halted gaze halts
the dashing of an unseen life
its peripheral snare.
 
We’re suspended
a lifetime it seems
in this double-bind, both
seized in seeing, being seen—or
seeking, being (the freer) sought.
I stand, dumb on crooked feet.
 
The path that was once
a line is now a frenzy
of false signs: stemline, fieldline,
bracken, betraying nothing.
I, ever a weak stalk,
run out of held breath,
and, after fruitless
gaping under the sun’s eye
walk on asquint
only to catch behind the crunch
of my step’s graveled shuffle
a rustle in the thicket
once more—a motion not mine.
 
Knowing better than again to try
seizing the mover mid-scurry
I keep on, turning only
an ear to make out
in sound the shape,
form of another’s foot
feather, or scale.
 
I never do see it
but have heard
and in hearing felt
on the stretched skin
of an inner drum
its step or slither.

Worry wort. Worry word. Worryward. Ward (warden?) of worry.
Worted. Worted by worry. My warp and weft.
Workday done, with the feeling I should do more. More
is possible / necessary to do. To be done.
With work, more to be done.
Being done. Dream of being done. As a roast is done. As a meal, done.
In the pub, many people many voices voicing over atop one another.
Voices on voices on voices on glasses as ice on glass, glass, iced over
and done with. As the spirit moves me as the spirit moves across
the water is never finished, never over and done
with water spiriting over waterglassing over, iced over, spirit
moves as glass, centuries in the making, melts toward the earth.
Millennia in the melt, molten icy and glassy in surface-break. As the
            spirit breaks
in breakers of water as the spirit freezes like water as glass, breaking
like ice underfoot the spirit, too,
breaks underfoot. As earth flows
in the surface break and breaks
into glass spirit flows in the breakers and melts
earthward, breaks, worryward,
into songbreak.
Break.
As underfoot the song breaks
fire the water iced over
sings of molten centuries and dreams
of sky glassed in earthmelt,
songbreak.
Free, earth sings centuries of glass
as a songbreak. Frees water or ice
back to the glassy breakers’ broken skyglass. Spirit moves
across the waters and back
to the songbreak, back to the song-swells,
back, break backward,
worryward, to word.

Climbing the milk-orange fire
escape, a descending diagonal
stair: oaken
two-by-fours,
blackened in places
where a smoke’s cherry
rested: days counted
in burns: as good a method
as any.
 
Let’s all just stop writing and speaking
in prose. Absinth and Absalom
settle the stomach.
 
There are two boys I see
around town. They remind
me of you. That is not
what I want to say. They
are you before
they are not. One
has a strawberry wine
stain across his face. The other
has no face at all.
 
Both move,
locking or unlocking
their bikes
with the caved-in
hunger-struck grace
of mantises, stooping to spin
threads of nothing
on fine green
elbow-balanced
prayer-spindles.