When you deafen
rain becomes
the walls of orchestra
tumbling in that
uncanny way
of bamboo and deforestation
brass and woodwind with
a thousand plectrum eyes
in the octopoid tangle
reaching for prayers with sparred
and upthrust arms
as if
in a lightning season
boats shed unwanted petal skins
bared, swayed sank or mired
but
between the secrets
of an eyelid’s flicker stillness
– an inadvertent claw
a few inviolate tears
never
exactly seeing
Scientists grew tear ducts
In a jar
Spent the day in mockery
Until they cried
A seldom kind of love
For their bastard child
Poked and prodded, niggled
Shamed, curtailed
Obedience praised until
The organism wept
The experiment, upon repetition
Bore bitter fruit
Inconsolably weeping
With just a half an hour’s
Earnest jests
We are all old now
Or naively young
I turned the word
You gave
Like clay, separated
To nebulous parts
Not quite rejoined again
Stretched, affixed, addended
Made to serve the hollow shape
Of as yet undetermined meanings
Under the microscope
Tears of anger, tears of grief
Tears of your everyday failures
Are as unalike as snowflakes
Melting in the caveats of your face
The ice shelf calves
The beast on unsteady feet
Circumambulating a subpolar current
As if an isthmus masked
In cruciform Pierrot markings
A tedium’s dissolve
Slap away the proffered hand
Topsy-turvy islands
Far from reach
Image adapted from; Wilson Bentley and William Humphreys’ Snow Crystals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931).