bits of elsewheres

protuberance
an echo poem *
[written late last night]

i mouth my secrets from a
mountaintop, where they are heard as silence
by everyone. the breeze that blows here is
flecked with bits of elsewheres, and the
sand that grits my soles the sum
of anywhere and nowhere, fragments of
a family of rocks, somewhere, all
shedding their substance to the
cutting caress of the wind. an echo sounds
my voice, in a tone i do not
recognize: my being
tallied in mistakes not made.

i see myself a
poet only when alone. a poem
does not wriggle when the sun is
out, for fear its presence will outshine the words. it is the
dusk that finds the gaps of which i am a product.

* (After Jennifer Hill, this poem contains an "echo"
made by reading the last word of each line, in a downward fashion.)