Originally published by The Light Ekphrastic, Summer 2016 

If we doubled back together, we could find
a few years of stumbling,
a high cold shout, a cracked knee
when I fell running on ice

in the dark. What I ran toward is lost
not only to time but to my own
failure, a misfire with the target
now too distant to make out.

Everything eventually
elopes into the woods
without me. I heard a recording once

of an orchestra breaking down,
like ants moving over the outline
of a monster dragonfly, and I can’t say
it moved me. Nowadays I wake up

and don’t even try to recall
the night before; I put the smashed thing
back on the shelf. And I know
how the fields went fallow

but not what was planted in them.
I know how, far below blacklights, I dreamt
of jellyfish, but I never bothered
to figure out why. I lie still.

Under my eyelids
a smeared dark thing raises its head
and charges at me. I can’t even remember
the shape of its teeth.