remembering michaux

Against the window of your nakedness –
a mortal frost
eyelid against shoulder falls
to solitude that sorrow cannot mend
and wakes to absence,
morning passing to exultant day.

And in Krakow,
before the thousand-eyed cathedral,
a man sinks to his knees
wreathed in the gliding breasts of pigeons.
He is singing almost without sound –
Panis Angelicus
light fails and the birds,
air lifting through their feathers like breath,
in vain do they use their silence to reach him –
it is absolutely in vain.