eye your symbols
with inexplicable dread,
like a pair
of hungry rusted
calipers on the page
or two
of a disappointed fence's
warped boards,
long past brown now
and headed more
towards gray
as you don't so much
circumscribe as
underline what remains:
the size of a place
when nothing there
is left,
and there's nothing
left to be done;
the truth
that absence
is not the same
as nothingness
(for absence
is a vacancy in space—
whereas nothingness
is the full weight
of space
and vacancy's absence);
and the fear that,
after this, quite enough
has been said.
