#judith skillman

Tell me any color— sea lavender, limonium, marsh-rosemary— I tell you l believe in any memory come from water.

A sky full of foam, a fire burning down the hatchery, that’s the madness of July. Give me the herb, the everlasting calyx.

Dry me a bouquet and quiet the wind. Let night put out even the boldest blues, the most outrageous purples and dissolute creams.

So much blood from such a small wound.

A Green Tail leaves a plume against cerulean sky, and, in my grown daughter's yard, the red-headed woodpecker— mascot for my dead father— has left not a spot of cherry-skinned bark unmarred.

I am not yet destitute? Have the children— have their children left for good?

So many varied calls accost the ear. Why must its tiny hairs rise, cocked for sound on a silent afternoon where only the honk of a car, the breeze riffling leaves, and those smaller, more vulnerable aircraft scratch a path across the zenith.

The catch—there's always a feather or a bit of tar caught in the cat's throat.

Still, I am all awe. Like the well of imagination—where, as children. we dropped our precious sticks and coins to see down the darkest sky.

cutting through one house to wing another. The train whistle urgent, its butterflied

cars snaking as if through tunnels inside other tunnels. The giftee can never

thank the giftor. Protagonist outside— on leaving his prison-castle-blinks, dazed

by the escape route through green-blue waters. You dream of counter-espionage, schisms.

Is is autumn come back to recommend travel abroad, to dictate another

kind of aging, future's doppelganger? Double glass holds full moons: faint, feint, fainter.

You come to envy the death of Pan, how that could happen- an immortal, a musical soul,

perhaps a child, someone not strong enough to endure cold nights that sweep up leaves in their teeth.

The comb rests idle in your hand, a vestige of the world you no longer belong to,

and from that delusion wrung into thin sun pooled in moss and weeds, between the wild currant

and the hardy fuchsia, you see your own yearning, caught between the beast and the beauty.

I am the red brand on the shoulder of the condemned, the gallows and the rope, the ax and the block, the whip and the cross.  I am the lion's tooth in the flesh of the gazelle. In my veins I have the blood of the slave trader.  Hangman, I have deserved the hunger of the wolves.  My victims have left me nothing but their deaths.