It was always autumn in the paraphernalia of my laudanums.
There was someone in my autumns in a wheelchair whom my heart
Was aching for—inevitable as moss; the intensity of my sympathy
Was mostly out of fear of living in a chair like that myself.
Wouldn’t you feel likewise, if you couldn’t—poppet—walk?
When I was a minx, I always slept alone from him.
Now most everyone wants to ask me if I really sleep
And if I love. If they are gentlepersons they shut up.
Indelible, my joy.
At evening, syrinx of birdsong, obsessive as the woman in the druid-blue
Uniform of a civil servant writing and rewriting marginalia
To the memoir of the life she wished she’d lived.
Of my own venatic arts, everything I ever killed had never been alive.
Then there’s the incessant scrubbing of the sugarbowl for arsenic, and guile,
After any hope of fact, forensically.
I’m not bored yet.
And all the dark I did is done.