I can't grasp it: | a life and the way the parts fit together, | spare as syllables, | the way they mesh and bind | to look as if there were a form being followed. | And like words, | a life is work that | I as ghostwriter must detail. | Hands smeared with ink as blood. | It's up to me to get it right, | to put the head back on, | to line the letters up | like corpuscles in the capillary, | to bind a point of view to this life. || Time after time I find myself, | this small figure with no angel, | stumbling over nights and words | in the book of shadows and souls, | its paper black from the travel | of my finger on its pages, | following along the line of a life. || What does it matter, | trying to lure lucidity from a story | with the ending this apparent? | I might as well have stones for eyes | and sticks for limbs, | I'm that unable to change anything. || Today I'm undeterred by the bright shock | of possible beauty. | A man is dead by his own hand, | his open head like a verb slowly descending. | His blood pours out in my line. | I've read it over and over, | I've been stirred by it. | Still I can't figure why it doesn't live. A western god removes a head | then fails to restore it. | I wait for him to restore it. | I wait for his hands slowly descending, | to feel them heavy on my shoulders. || These lines are black fire and exist like a life. | The dumb wonder of seeing his face now, | nights without sleep. | Now I face squarely the bright light of speech | that the dead close their mouths on. || This is an offering of cartoonish prayers | that come shrouded in my body like solitude. | "The sentence like a tongue in a higher mouth" | to make the utterance possible.