I have lost the reckoning of myself,
too engaged in survival to really
live and die; my favorite books on the shelf,
and the dreams of my chest faded, silly:
The call was flowing, like a summer spring,
but a winter of wanting chilled the flow;
the fall was a harvest of everything
I’d lived for before; I stored it below:
The surface was stored, I guess, for future
moments when clarity was not a block
to worldly success – a split no suture
could fuse between life and death, sea and dock:
The sundered self, following others’ tracks
for the golden words on the deathstone plaque.