In Shadows.
 
i.

Shadows in the eye divide
where walls & doors & floors collide.

The hand´s grip, the flayed hide,
I do not know the driver´s cry
nor the donkey´s bray.
 
Our shouts mingle, the switch
& the hide are my burden.
Half the hand, half the hide,
who´s the beast that bridles the bride!
 
Day yokes a shadow,
a humped form flickers a fan fin,
a corona for the load. 

Quieter still, tethered shadows on the hill,
than the bray of the marketer.
 
ii.

The one who hides in a place of shadows is trapped.
The one who seeks there the hidden is lost.
 
The jester courts a screen to an audience unseen,
as though upon a stage shadows turned on every page.
 
No shadow is lost to the phantom in the glass.

Companion to your host, nameless shadow in your doom,
could I so command you, not to pass, when I pass,
would the world then fall apart, where I struggle & you slide
to glide between a sky shed thin as a skin.

Shadows fall to steal the hours,
fall to steal the face of flowers.
Sing shadow´s a slave,
drunk to the moon,
as silent they vanish, as silent they loom,
who speak more silent than the tomb.

In the gloaming the solitary reaper reaps its shadow:
on pathways in the heat of night's starlight
shadows grow to seem as if watery pools
floating glittering rims seized into blackness.