I listened, and so I died,
enchanted inside your songs.
As the notes burn,

for a moment I jitter again
in their shadows. Sing on!
But you turn.

How many nights I was created whole
to be replaced
by sweat and hugged covers.

No number marks
the passages I have shared with the grim boatman
radiating inside your look.

It is not strange to be subsumed
in fear. Each sleep,
another medusa casts

her occluding gaze, together
whirling into one frozen flash of apprehension.
Well I am a garden of statues.

What is peculiar, is I feel for
each of my killers
as the punt must by now feel

intimate with its stately arc. Down,
into the pitch of Lethe
and then retrieved,

half remembering the eternal grip,
half always being renewed to memory
like a spine,

living in moments that acquire no past,
yet firmly grooved in Charon’s palm.
Inscrutable, his

black cowled directions: from dissolve,
threading in finger-nerves to a larger plan,
the boat seeming to plow straight

but the trail is untraceable.
When you fear,
you look at me with this course in mind.

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