1. Your Wound

Your wound
leaks memories; deer caught in
his struggle, your wound
bleeds stories fading
the ground in splashes
of half-real fog-light.

I mumble dream-verses,
soak in hope to sponge
against your wounds:
do you remember, then,
those winters, those springs,
those talks of colors half-real,
longings we ourselves cannot devise?

Have these faded, too, into
the blood and the fog that eats
at your limbs? I press my head to your heart
longing still for its signal
that you will rise again, and days
will be as they were.


2. The War in the Fog


I spot you in the fog.
where your body presses, light splinters
in slender, wavering shafts. Your wound
is deep, and in the tremble of the air, howls
of fanged beasts rise, clawed
and fully ready. I wait, and bear your hope.

I feel their thunderhead-rising, and can only hope
to trick them from you in the fog:
oh, the futility of such escape, death and its claws,
but still, my fear is sharper, driven in my heart, a splinter
that you may not rise again, howls
at tornado pitch through me. I will wound

if I must, the sniveling beasts that wound
their way through the day, or so I hope:
has night already broken? The howls,
ceaseless. The bodies, lost in fog.
You and they are all alive; my words splinter.
Heartbeat. Earthquake. Courage. Claws.

They circle without meaning, avoiding the clawed
out sight of your chest, my heart's drop at your wound.
The crowd races and darts, recollects, bands, splinters,
organized only by the passing moment's will. Hope
is all we see in the waves, shining out in the fog
like the distant stars that catch our howls.

My thoughts, half-blended into howls,
scramble through my head, through clawed
history, torn and indistinct as fog.
Tatters of sunny days when all I'd wound
was metaphysics of an argument, or hope
for a snatchet of fairytale. It's all splinters.

But I'll shield them, those shards, those splinters,
build verses of these throat-straining howls;
little else can be demanded of me but hope
(or am I demanding it?) in a clawed
-through world like this. My wounds
are just, to drive away the fog.

For that hope, I'll face any claws,
become a mess of wood splinters and wounds;
I howl with fear, and still -- I'll seek your safety in the fog.