In Water, the Marked One Fades

You have known the rain to seethe
the flesh in just this way.
As bones are of and separate from
your diaphanous blond-capped head,
would anyone believe if you were
to say all the world is a lay in which
water accepts the emergence of
your splendor then casually lets it fade?

You bend to touch your etchings
over a shoal pond on the road,
then how your silhouetted mate wilts
you down through the tinted glass
so clear it could be a quiet symphony.

Under the faint ripples, you are
an old woman stitching her wrist bones
to paper-thin arms, trimming
her newly sewn coat beneath the pale mirror.

And like so many other impressions,
you will feed the wet fever on the street,
where you’ll eventually fall
into its concave bowl. Because at some point,
you are a city shrugged itself back
into the fluid fold, into the languid and
gray spirals clinging to the sliver of
sky and earth, as the sun goes under
the throat and your eyes reach back to
pull the grey curtains of rain like a splat.