Battlements

The walls of your keep, miles high
thick as a pre-dawn panic,
bridge drawn as tight as virgin thighs
the birds fly over and come out songless
and feather-charred.

Years of scrabbling have taught me the meaning of futility,
the pathos of patience, and the knack of being
a good outsider looking in through
the arrow slits of your heart.

And so, to pass the time I’ve imagined your interior
strewn with dead lovers or overgrown with briar
or enclosing a mad saint in the courtyard tied
to a fossilized tree.

Perhaps a plague has taken all within
and I’m getting nothing but the echoes
of a place defeated by its own hand
while waiting for the plague
to pass.