Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.
                                     T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

I lost my way in a cactus grove
about five o’clock in the morning
When the moon slung high and all was quiet and
still as the grave I see outside my mother’s window
where the widow knits her web of tears and lace and
the crystal I did not get for my wedding but lost instead
when the ship went down and sank and sank in the grass
like the headstone the earth always reclaims.

I can no longer read the words

But see the moon in an owl’s eye
white as a barn with a glass dished face
Heart shaped and hollow
stuffed not with straw but the dust and sand and ashes
of a world that did not whimper but cried
at the funeral of cousin and kin that it cannot          remember.

I cannot remember.

Her face and name are a stranger to mine
lost in that looking glass dream of time and
a silent kingdom that cannot speak but whispers.

There is no Bang here to shake these dusty cobwebs
from their rotting shelves in the shed
behind the barn that once was
and was no longer.

Instead I wander

In this glass bowl fish tank shell of empty eyes
that closes all around us like the ice
that used to frost the neighbor’s pond before
the night wind came to cast it into slate
And the marble that I cannot shape with my bare hands
but hold and trace
the cracks as they linger
in the weathered groves that time has sanded away         so far.

How do I mourn what I cannot remember?

Instead I make this pilgrimage
to empty spaces where even time all but forgets
the soul that hungered and
the song that withered in the cold desert
nights where frost hung like lace in the sand
that mingled with the salt in my eye
to trace tears in constellations
what I have forgotten              how   to read.

How can anyone do but linger?