XL.
Shattered, shattered, shattered. There are so many ways
To break the vessel, sometimes no single way will do. Of course,
There are those who’ll happily do it for you: ball-peen & crowbar, lace & kiss.
Whatever was in there—water or soul or silence—now here seems so little
To miss. The pieces have fallen like leaves in the circumference
Of rain, the debris of glass or ceramic or rare porcelain—it doesn’t matter;
The vessel is only the shape to be recalled as what once one was …
The shape & semblance & the taste of rain. The shape to be shattered, shifted
& sifted again & again … The soul or water or silence refrains from staining
The page, this page, with the blood of any name. If peace is distant, at least
Night seems close at hand. That mist of lavender in the air is the scent,
The fragrance, of the lamp lit in the widow’s window as the ship
Turns at the jetty’s end; the single ghost on deck—even at this distance of waves
& brine—seems lost in that cloud of remorse burning in the window, burning
All the way from her misery to his faint & salty skin.
—David St. John, from The Face: A Novella in Verse (Harper, 2004)
