everything was bathed in yellow,
surrounded in fleetness and subtlety
like the hidden skin of a butterfly,
secret smoke and strange air in these
cavernous eclipsed rooms.

the war of landscape extended inside
as proof, poignant and wistful, of
the stasis of vacillating punishment.

we could barely see the war, imminent
calamity setting a course in silence,
our mutability confounding.

the jumbling snow faded
the belly-ache, your body
a fallacious term usurped
by the emptiness seized
by poetics; i see it in echoes
and the strange details of soil,
mapping out destruction in
the silence behind the always
more distant life of memory.

you cause sorrow, leaving
only fragments of this shiningly
colored life behind in the deep
black where everything you are
draws up in silence.

demon promises rust the ruins and
trace your departure in the snow.