In the parched night, I am an army

against myself. Strange comfort

from camels reflected in the window

of the vacant house. Oddments

fill the crevices, though the paint

has peeled. I feel disappearance

in the shape of things, only unfleshed

bones holding memory in place.

Evidence is not a promise of solid ground.

The landscape, concrete buildings,

cracking, no longer remembered

in the long line of fragile ghosts.

Words, through cyberspace, wash

the air and I am quenched. The sag

in absence, though invisible, leaves

the trace of downward flight.

If I could understand the weight of loss,

I’d know why man reads goose bones

for the weather of his soul, or finds

reptiles in the lifted feathers of a swan.




Peggy Aylsworth is a retired psychotherapist. Her poetry has appeared in The MacGuffin, Ars Interpres (Sweden), Beloit Poetry Journal and forthcoming in Poetry Salzburg Review and in numerous other literary journals throughout the U.S. and abroad. The Medulla Review has recently nominated a poem of hers for a Pushcart Prize.