As Tears
       

I'm thinking of his portrait: it's an X-ray,
a streetlamp: the leash of his spine beads
skyward from his haunches' cloud: he's
dying, but the X-ray's holistic in itself—
filmier and sweeter than my own
powdered, living bone. We'll have to
call it seepage, weltering, erosion, or any
word that typifies a structure treading
oceanward, breath-word birding in the
scape of the raze. And tissue still a music
now, thus regally to burn as tears go by.

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Copyright © 2013 Christina Pugh All rights reserved
from Grains of the Voice
Triquarterly Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission