Something Left Over
It must have been made
and rejected,
in night’s grinding gears –
a knobby irregularity,
a leftover of smelt and dross.
This is all there is
a gobbet of oven clinker,
but behind it I sense cracked teeth,
motes in a burnt eyeglass,
the thin singed bones
of fledgling flights into darkness.
Here it is,
a fragment long convulsed
from its own incineration,
an irregular rake-off, a detritus
dragged across a blind stone floor.
This tittle of slag once had to fit something
the rough rim of an iron door perhaps
behind which an old furnace
still cools in faraway minds.
A ferrous chip chiseled from a gulag,
or a souvenir from an SS campfire meet.
There is always something left
after the unthinkable
is thought upon,
always some spicule of irregularity
to explain or confound
as we toss it back into the fire again.
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