Wound the Day: Agonistes

deviant art by lonely pierot


Wound the Day: Agonistes


wound the day
break heaven
of its loss

carry difference
into the lamb
bleating

a stumbling
loneliness
caravan

she cannot
take his
pain

it is too
far in
him

& light
dims
red

a scar
cuts
it

bled
for
O

or how as he
watches
her

weep he thinks

perhaps sorrow
is not a time
for lessons

in economy

or if silence
betrays
trust

of a shout

red leaps
into a
song

breaking

the skin of
a moon-pulled
lake gasping past—

o what distance measures

as if what is carried
does not carry
what refuses

release—

how salt
accumulates
in a slow leaving

& nothing lasts

or how the cost of losing
ghosts builds a rapture
of cold emptiness &

canyons carry voices
washed in a harm
of white release

* * * *

or if her heaven
contains one
blind eye

what
becomes
a deeper ache

what sees thru
or what sees red
inside her absence

* * * *

a leaving cannot abide
& if a light belongs without
the heat pressed back what moans

o the longing harbors its roped intention—
endless waves of breaking
like tendrilled knots—
a weaving too wide she floats—
unwrapped in loneliness


Richard Lance Williams

Posted over on More Poetry