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Fugue State


by Sam Rasnake


In the back room someone plays a flute, missing notes

now and again, stumbling through measures of pain

into the head's deepest well.

 

An old paper's musk of news spreads open the unsexed bed.

 

By the window, a silk painting: small Chinese pagoda—empty—

on the wall of a mountain pass,

mist, one bird.

 

The maple trembles at the glass, shakes loose its leaves

while the moon's dark side braces for a direct hit

from the broken planet.

 

Spiders nest in my hair, walk over my chest.  Their bite is hushed,

unfelt.  I move my toes for the last time.

 

And the dog's barking grows fainter until I no longer recognize

urgency in his wet jaws.

 

              - originally published in Poems Niederngasse

 

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