Nothing under the skin is unified,

and it’s been the end for so long…

It might be time to refuse most of the world

so that the things we actually settle on glitter in new relation

to each other, becoming a formula, then further down the lane

we’ll be able to remember who we had been

and how we made it through the months, since when we think

of past seasons, we’re unable to understand ourselves

or how we endured. We’re like a parade whose marchers

join in for just a few blocks and then fall away to be replaced

by someone new, but each time we lose a marcher,

we all have to adjust to our shrinking history in a new world

where the towering height of strangers is that they don’t know

the story of our grief, and the buildings, dimpled with so many

volumes of shout, have never met the children of the builders,

and we can’t know what it all might mean to the giant grids

of glass panels and the sharp slabs of granite which reinforce

this feeling that nothing, nothing under this tawny sky is fluid,

but you and I, we might meet each other in passing

like little bones in an uncurling tail.