When You Told Me

Marked with lines of solicitude,
your face told me things I should
never have to know
and I could
feel  it
in both my hiding spaces
and those others
I cannot mask.

I knew only what was absent now
and in silence it began
to illuminate the torn, paper edges
of smoke clouds and an altered horizon
in a world which no longer knew light
and which bled fuel and fury.

I had long been afraid
of the edges tearing,
cowed by the blackened ice of my dreams,
and frightened of my own cells,
(and the end of all things good.)

The present has become an indictment,
with anxiety as my judge --
and the tears on my face
are worn like pending light and space between
the shadows
of vertical bars. 

©2003