Writer Am

I hear the emptiness
of the sound in the air,
blank
and distant.
Like dust
I hear her breathing
softly, rasping out
words she cannot find
cannot grasp —
letting them go, drift
across the canyon
falling into the deep brown
into black
into dark —
some make it
where she cannot touch
cannot leap —
left there at her side
staring.

I walk away
down the cobbled road
where lampposts glow
in the fog
gloomy and sweet
like muffled rain,
whispering triflings
into the waning dark.
But that lamp,
ah, that lamp,
it glows with all
the fires of the earth,
burning with the light
of a thousand suns
before it,
shimmering with heat
and gentle intensity,
yet what is seen
through that fogged-up glass,
through the opaque
two-way mirrors,
is a soft, permeating swell
of flame
keeping constant,
shrouded to walkersmoverspassers-by,
but there.