Clefts

I have lain my stripes to cure
on the coffee table, have set them in rows
alongside its wood-grain,

creating a double striation
that both illumines and elides
feeling with real. On the table’s face

I have fashioned a dense terrain
that spans the limits and range of sorrow,
scratches, grooves, and the indeterminate

furrows of existence draping itself over splinters
like semi-shine varnish
stippling a carved board. In such clefts,

the ripples and folds whose smallness overtakes them
(as mine does me), I have hidden what is unalive
with the living rifts I wish to preserve.