A Flat Farewell
The apartment houses around us have rendered me an apartness: no clues help me fill in kinship down, or across, their windows.
The woods are ruffling breastfeathers. A flickering fur of alder leaves touches the birches’ frieze lapping the yellow wall.
Our horizon’s trinkets are grey as pencil, in the sky’s whited-out bell where a round tung deafens the eye with a puff of air.
On to islands of silence in the watery roar drops of burnt voice fall from the wind.
Through our years a heathland of waste was heaped with gouged earth. Erasing the school’s red roof From sight; grazing
the cathedral tower. Reviewing the observatory; but still we can scan the badged belt beyond it where accessories deck the horizon.
Twice seven years from the seventh floor I have watched white ships glide over the trees: from the oratory of my apartment, the horizon that will commemorate me.