There Is No Pretending

There is no pretending to know
What crawls out of the mind lying quiet
By itself in the snow of the grave grass.
The living know this alone:
The onomatopoetic fout-ta-ta-rou of the mural valve
Inferred but not felt by a mind that has left
Itself to others. Decisionless and dull, I am one
With the glass-bound aluminum clouds
In a glitter-knitted metallica sky. I live on
The bite of air that follows a door's night close
And the dusky base of the thumbnail that darkens
As it presses down on earth fading away beneath
It. Pax, peace. Axe, beat
of the heart and its dumb numbered afterecho.

Copyright © 2007 Mary Jo Bang All rights reserved
from Pleiades
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission