EPHEMERON
Night you sleep
in my eyes, ancient ink
your aeons curled up, feline
spurning the ides of day that leave
me these rubbled lexemes these frayed
splittings of words running like fingers
of a lost wind in my tangled mind
The cold scalpel moon has bled you night,
to a paler shade of black faded
as my boat unmoored,
waded in your sky of shards
Aldebran, Orion, the unbraided
strands of the maiden Pleiades
mourning the path of lost planets
hurtling nowhere in their sleep
Night I hold
your nebulae, your subtle
clay, your dark matter ever dreaming
into bruised silence I steep
and keep you cupped in earthen
slowness to my ear molded
by a mad Potter’s wheel
Night I scatter cenotaphs for your children
those burdened by the death of living
my word-flowers blossom tiny
fractals in your kneeling flashes
your sweet veins of lightning
Night you open
an electrum, a chrysalid
a gold-silver mined in the strumming
throng stretched across my body, a
live wire protesting the tangents
of your absence the white
way it slices my limbs
nine lives like ninepins
tumbling
Night, you are
an ellipse of eye and I
a fabled spell
that disappears
in the palm of naming
© 2009 Sophia Pandeya
