If you counted afternoons as fingers
and through dead forests knew the leaf’s sorrow
If you, through tears, made the word in the sky
burst into flower
&
When the atlas of gardens, cut by the rain,
shuffles its mineral rainbow to other wounds
&
When, black shoed, you write in naked colours
of twitching stars and trapped songs on branches
& even if the appearance, through the lagoon of blood,
is half-covered with moss, then either:
(a) Judge the light in late November sun as unworthy to your eyes
(b) Let the breeze carry the seed from your fingertips to mine
(c) Fall asleep between shadows, the invisible labyrinths of dream
or
(d) Chase unknown roads to where once I stood.
Answer: (d)