The Overgrown Path

Song

Even asleep, you’re everywhere.
You fall through the house,
right down to the small room
where I sit staring at the screen.
Your head rests on a blinking cursor,
there’s a menu for your toes,

you’ve somehow
drifted into the CD drive
and come out as Janacek,
the overgrown path, the barn owl
lifting its wings. You lurk behind my eyes
and broadcast from my bones

but even miles away, you’re on my tongue,
you’re banging down the door.
Sometimes I wake in dread
that you might have lifted off
like some bright machine
or vanished music, the owl lurking

in the dangerous dark outside.
What if I couldn’t hear you?
As if there were anywhere now
out of reach, as if,
however late it was, or far
I wouldn’t hear you breathing

like a wing-beat in the blood,
a song passed from bone to bone. . .