Highly Tutored

Always she's falling over inside
never reaching the end, a hammer
smashing thin translucent glass

thin as the whispering fragile
promise she walks alone with, knowing
only outside, never feeling in

never seeing through the surface
of half-hearted smiles and loose
passing nods, silent voices lost,

her eye-acknowledged madness
pleading in a basket by the door
she walks past without mouthing

goodbye

into a wash of black granite night,
heavy - with only stars for comfort
she rolls back the collar of time

and sinks below in whorling form
a soft blown drizzle in cool mist,
springtime sun, the despair running

through her head, some tune
of a funeral song she remembered
singing on that night before he left:

dark gifts, bleak memories, spirit
sleeping, a self-watching angel alloyed

above, holding truth at bay, forged
white hot in the inchoate moment, logic
nascent, underfed soul positioning

before us in the dust, forgotten
soldier-gods in the endless realm
of endless rain, in a time far off

a mythic sun that once, on the shortest
day, briefly connected moments to a brow

of kings, the falling star, your cynosure,
annointed one.