Like Frankenstein the monster I willed you wake
who was really–correct mistake–doctor and monster.
But you played dead, seemed sadist, wielding that penultimate,
human, a moment, gone, or still in bed.
The wind offered rattled windows and blown-off blossoms,
the intimacy of an eye that looks protected, vanity,
a windy brain that plumbs the surface,
the body’s fool-hardiness
displayed in apple petals laid deathless,
detached, presentable, feelingless,
snow not melting into union, oh eventually
rotten, forgotten: it’s blood I shriveled from, its secret
courses inside you. The nightmare, my dream
mask of discharged blood, love’s misprize, a masque
of the moment it wasn’t you, mere token,
my stacked heads totem, the latest too-late acquisition.
The vita of the tree stays hidden
from the wind’s ravish. So yield my ghost
control, unman that manikin, and you will awaken
into union, my imagined monumental moment?
I forget too scientistic, familiar failure of the alchemist:
gold stuck in head. The unpredicted follows its unprediction
like the clock’s arrhythmia advances the hours
to a dead certainty. A loan is a hole and any gravedigger
gardener knows the dirt alone won’t fill it.
My inhabit of waiting, buds borrowed from the branches,
It can’t be forgiven. The years I dun against add-up,
yield dead already us.
Richard Meier
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