We wake to the rumbling thunder of blood,
Pumping hearts, twisted hearts, this shadow and I
Squeeze into the thick silences of trees.
Now the dark lights of Christmastide afflict us
Twilight memories drift, flux and flicker
In this breeze of time.
Penumbra-beginning, hologram-end,

Such pungent affirmations,

Slip into the generations of suffering:

Eyes lifted to a cross, a crescent, a menorah,
Yearnings spilling onto the page of history:
Promises made and never kept.

We slip
Out of time’s descent;
In the beginning was my end, my friend.

The sacred apartness of the intelligible:
Fragments of the blood, firings in the brain,
The body, a holy place again.
This tinder-box of meaning flares,
Ebbs, flows,
Means
To an end.