Likenesses

This body that I am now forced to own once was a glove for desiring hands, and a hand for the warm fitting-rooms of strangers. I am an owner of derelict houses. their roofs and walls unrecognizable In the harsh light of a dawn mirror. Parts of this ‘me’ still are affixed to the pages of put-away scrapbooks albums of disinherited images Once upon-a-time forms now lay buried in fallow fields memorial plots, visited by ailing angels that keep alive transient likenesses in shoeboxes of heavenly haunts. Looking at this that I have become I wonder what part I played In the ruination of my castle keep, what parts the attrition of decades have reduced a temple into a place where seagulls fight for scapes in a perishing landscape? Let grace be my life-raft, let the young be my saviors, but of course any rescue now must be only a weakening gesture, a fist shaken at the unchanging stars.