On a remembered line

On a remembered line

Did you too, poet, dream thus?

In dreams embattled by wishes to wake

into them, I suffer soft ceremonies of sacrifice

- she turning, rigidly bewildered, into stone

accreting like an alien bone, deep inside me.

Sometimes then I wish to hold her, as

if my touch could shake this sedimentation, this

terrible drying into the mere debris of my days

and I twist my dream to reach her:

Twist, and know already that my touch is

a fate worse than gold.

That is her tomb, then, my heart grown stone

with sacrifices I can no longer say

have our names etched on them.

Did you too, poet, wonder then,

if sacrifices ever have names that mean

their sacrifice? Meanings

really carved in stone?