Vaguer

The compulsion to disappear
weighs heavily.
For one burning instant,
the light comes undone, scatters is threads
from horizon to horizon.

We have these ashes, you see.

Something in her voice suggests a reticence.
What is concealed there?
Flowers, discarded, left to dry
by the path toward forgetting.
The vapors quickly fatten in the throat,
stinging the soft tissue,
but hesitantly.

Something in her touch suggests a reticence.
This testimony will be stricken
with plague or madness.
The cold breath of twilight
leaves all that I am
in so many words,
and I grow vaguer in the stillness.

-r. miller