Half Life

This is not the desert where delirious
de Saint-Exupéry followed paw prints
to a lair, surprised any life still held
his interest, his tongue filling his mouth,

not the oasis where Alexander
wasted in feverish apostrophe
to Pallas or the dead-redolent wind.

And no, not the highway the Bedouin
combs for remnants of his daughter, blankly
shambling in the DU dust (here the hand
too small yet to learn the quanoon). Forget
the brown runnel the children cup hands to.

Forgetting will get you here, the nowhere
whose middle is the deep-out-of-mind,
the mind of habit regarding sorrow
as the blush of a distant simoon.

For a time one may be said to live here,
owning no shadow, another absence
from whom even the raven wants nothing.

Copyright © 2004 Reynolds Dixon All rights reserved
from Beloit Poetry Journal
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission