Sunday, November 8, 2009

Up Close

the glossed fibers of the box,

as I saw them last, were accentuated by the finish,

the deep coloring that makes wood look more

like the wood of our scrutinous imagination;


we saw each fiber clearly,

years we counted as children

packed together under the pressure of life

and again, in dirt, with your death;


is it coincidence or irony we bury, both,

seeds of life and embalmed shells of minds we loved

encased in embalmed arboreous corpses?

you would say nothing if I asked this,


partially because you are no less

than six feet away from me at any given moment,

partially because your consciousness, as I imagine it,

is too close for me to touch, our mouths gummed shut


2 comments:

  1. Coffins as seeds as coffins. That's pretty awesome! The only thing that I stumbled on was the double use of "embalmed". It interrupted the flow of my reading.

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  2. I will definitely take that into consideration in future rewrites. Thanks!

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