Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

In dreams his pale bride came to him out of a green and leafy canopy.

At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small penknife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.

Look up.
Tell me what you see.

blessed are the wombs that are barren
blessed are branches that bear no fruit
blessed are the rivers run dry

because we have come to the end of the world

perhaps beyond those shrouded swells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun.