The Sieve

for Linda

The word will never be uttered without feel.
Darkness, in another hemisphere echoes distance–
accommodates a cloud of unknown named pain.
A juxtaposed stomach, half life & half death is divide
by a shadow so cold [winds] Deep and Sterile.
The passing of compound moments utterly sieve.

Gather and embrace and clasp. Clutch the sieve.
Silence draws a cold nip at a soul– jars a feel.
A gap between her & I marks a distance.                                 [two pillars]
Unintentional and acute, memory summons pain.
But as words catalyze to be spoken, a divide
births a dark light through the womb senescent; sterile.

How does a man approach what is sterile?
A negative; the man caught and clasped in a sieve.
Death, shadow, cold, and the dark light all feel–
they collaborate and construct an immense distance.
Further, Farther, Far– the Farthest destroys pain.
The pain follows them into an abyss, a divide.

Snow falls over the shadow. The memory is Divide.
A winter front, gray and threatening sterile–
but heed not– the deed and spoiled gathers in the sieve,
clever to avoid a breakdown, shifty for a false feel.
Tracks of a husbands feet shoveling piles of distance
numb his unsheathed hands, naked heart, disparate prints, pain.

And we settle because the depth pocked with pain
is a label which severs unitary emptiness that's divide.
Caper to the vicious circle, a cyclical death sterile,
contained and frozen by the pure and holy sieve.
We drag our claw as the abyss tugs us from the feel.
Now we flip or flop in favor of the uncouth Distance.

Shadow and Darkness remain and persist in Distance.
One deceives the other and reciprocates a universal pain.
Exhausted, life simplified in surrender, Death is divide.
If only our Mothers or Fathers had been equally sterile,
then all Sons and Daughters could have escaped the great sieve.
No loss for word, no need to respond, no need to continue, no need to feel.

Distance sterilizes the feeling,
much like time in the dark divides all
that settles. A silty pain putting the sieve to use.