Decades in their jail: more than life
to half the nation locked inside their law.
Overhead the years collect
in sedimentary array:
clay and clay and clay of the same dilemma
—that delayed release will hurry freedom—
compress and harden;
and each new season blunders through the window grate
too drunk to notice.
The slow strobe of moonlight
glides through skin in single vigil
turning, month to month, its crescent blade
in flesh that still remembers woman.
To seven-count
the wait for weekly prison privileges
—petty freedoms given or withdrawn—
reverberates
with memories of freedoms with no freedom.
The day revolves:
a pebble thumbed across the palm,
dark side up and light side down,
doubt denied but work made waste;
a half-turn more and in the shade of night
are only promise of tomorrow's labour
and idle confirmation of this morning's doubt.
The hour swells in time with stomach's rolling,
acids of the analytic mind
scouring and dissolving and re-dissolving
the old regrets, the new ennui
and the constant speculations.
The minute is the manacle; the will, the wrist.
Closest of fetters, tighter and tighter the fit of a minute's remembering
around the girth of a life's intent
as they squeeze and shrink to the second . . .
But the moment is the grain of grace.
Now—
when the only being is becoming
and the past is a glassed-in vacuum shattering endlessly—
is the time
when even sleeplessness and pain and doubt
will never, ever fracture resistance.
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