I see myself old as fuck, a twig
wrung dry by a young man's game.
Smelled in a corridor of life's wishes,
thought through the labyrinth of implanted hearts,
brought on an illegal feeling through glass walls
to the thickly rooted, thinly vaunted
superstructure of human animal
feeling, the cube of lungs building
on mid-air.

Dry as a baby, pawing the current
for rumors of hot life and super-heated life.
The grief of the trees is the grief of my bones.
The grief of the elves is the grief of the giants.
The grief of myth is a fist, and the grief of DNA
is a pang in the galaxy's work of ribs.
All things will be seen through, laser-lit
because they cannot remain flush.
The thrush tugs with beak at a wing-pit
in its staircase of feathers.
The spring of tigers will not come.
But one will come, and one, and one,
and one.