Lonely As A Dream

If
you come through the door
you see at once it's an old woman's house
smelling of apples, eucalyptus
and yellow books rhyming by size.
Nothing is new.

Incense
burns in the bedroom
for the sake of a man's memory
smoking and braiding in soft light
that slips through heavy drapes
like a child's song, clear in the silence.

Peace
is there, and emptiness.
The ghost has learned to
keep to its corner, and seldom speaks to
the woman who gambles with words
in the hunger before dawn.

She's
the laugh no one hears
at  the midnight carnival,
the road no one takes
winding back on itself, the sprout
light's pulled too thin, too tall
in its mirror, shadow.

Besides
the dream, she knows only
a sky flat with heat
that eats birds and rain,
a plague without cure
that stretches its dead skin
to infinity.

But
everything passes. To all things come
this tension of maximums
just before the breaking
and the letting go.


©joyannjones  September 2022