Cold Moons

Like a fiddle bow
on a flexed saw
my bones twang.

I rise from the bed
of the woman
of my dearest nightmares

and wake up
beside my wife.
My father walks

out of the cracked mirror
and without a word,
kisses me on the left shoulder:

I wake again,
beside, again , my wife.
How many wakings left to go?

I am no longer a young man.
Seven times seven
are the winters I have seen.

No longer the chosen lamb,
I still dream dreams
but I am not the son of these cold moons.

I never rode with coven
or Joan of Arc
and I never was a fickle one

tho’ all cats are grey
in the dark,
and a coat of many colors

is all black
in the Great House
of Mother Night.

A mercenary not for hire,
an assassin who does not kill,
worth no one's salt,

I take my pay in sand,
sands of sleep and time,
and spend it all

in the precinct of harlots
in the temple of the Crone.
She lays me down to sleep,

drapes me with her cloak
of many daughters,
so that I may be stabbed with sickles of light,

sore afflicted
with a pox of moons,
so that I may walk in other worlds,

in new wrinkles
of laminate verse,
and this is not a sin.

Dana Pattillo, 2007