the cracks of my crooked fingers
to mound smoothly at my feet,
you build your mounds into a mountain,
and add jagged cliffs and ragged ridges
with deep ravines.
There are no brooks to carry life water,
no trees to blossom toward autumn turning,
no flowered plant to open to absent
green valleys. No birds to flit and carry
song. No lichen coating spring rocks
to water green patches on airless slopes.
Deep is the silence of the rising dawn,
colored redness in gray mist, no yellows
to grace the slopes, no purples horizon,
as if dead in a toneless shroud, the day
arrives in robes of no motion, no purpose
to drifts clouds of dull iron plate.
I cannot paint what refuses color,
nor fill the sounds in a void too quiet,
to plant life in a barren fallow grounds,
to carry life where there is no feed or shelter.
I build a fire of light to watch it smolder,
to watch another death, to witness my own.
� 2000 DPMcClellan
