Pondered

Faint moonlight out the window, shadowed from the house, is lost inside. Vague feelings obscured as colors merged in night’s fetid penetration; and sitting thinking in the bedroom, my back against it, laughing at my soul. Deep, rivers dredged, shit of wet mountains, sift of angry fields. Precipitation of greasy possibilities, shifting between uncertain walls. My soul a shroud, a pall, lying on the floor. A darkness under the bed slowly, conceals an understanding, thick and putrid gray. I avert my gaze from corners. Excrement of days. Laughing like a riverbank, like damp blankets shriveled in a bedcrack. The dark answers itself outside the door. All wood is wilted. In the morning, the rug will be thought to have become green again, and the sun will have closed the walls.

March 1972