i.
Shadows in the eye divide
where walls & doors & floors collide.
*
The hand´s grip, the flayed hide,
I do not know the driver´s cry
nor the donkey´s bray.
*
Our shouts mingle, the switch
& the hide are my burden.
*
Half the hand, half the hide,
who´s the beast that bridles the bride!
*
Day yokes a shadow,
a humped form flickers a fan fin,
a corona for the load.
*
Quieter still, tethered shadows on the hill,
than the bray of the marketer.
ii.
The one who hides in a place of shadows is trapped.
The one who seeks there the hidden is lost.
*
The jester courts a screen to an audience unseen,
as though upon a stage shadows turned on every page.
*
No shadow is lost to the phantom in the glass.
*
Companion to your host, nameless shadow in your doom,
could I so command you, not to pass, when I pass,
would the world then fall apart, where I struggle & you slide
to glide between a sky shed thin as a skin.
*
Shadows fall to steal the hours,
fall to steal the face of flowers.
Sing shadow´s a slave,
drunk to the moon,
as silent they vanish, as silent they loom,
who speak more silent than the tomb.
*
In the gloaming the solitary reaper reaps its shadow:
on pathways in the heat of night’s starlight
shadows grow to seem as if watery pools
floating glittering rims seized into blackness.
