Has nothing changed?
Oil lamps and torch lights catching
ellipsis in mid-flight,
preventing it from reaching the

moon: singed, already, by birds on heat.

Baked now, in the sun.
Flayed to pith
but hiding nothing.
Certainty makes fools of us.

She doesn—t know her crime,
only that she enjoys the increments
of the four seasons,
and the folds of unswept beaches—
No one telling you whether to sink

or swim.

And now the first waves of shadow
roll across the square. The fire-folks are gone
and the moon is the white of Pierrot.
In the morning there will be a sentence;
a full sentence at last—

as if things were any different spelt out
from what is more or less known.