PAN !

Pan !

And so I never ceased to keep to myself
The warnings whispered by the level-crossing keeper
“Take care of yourself,” he would drone
“the freckles on your left shoulder,
in the fold between your breasts, have, will have meaning only for me,
poor keeper of your longings for elsewhere,
fragile alternatives to a rooted present”
Rare and derisory encrypted constellations
By way of an acceptable transaction.
The cannon now rumbles two steps away.
Ah, if only we had been able to hear it!
But you remained resistant to every cold alert
And I stayed insensible,
Lazy, ethereal witness of my years of a digit and a half,
To the smell of that powder.
A powder fashioned
Far from the powder works of Sorgues
The one where, I recall, one evening in May you had lost your right arm,
Your reason.