Elegy For Les Poem by Leslie Philibert

So when my profile
falls apart
and every swing door greets

a stranger an old man has
kidnapped my soft face.
My eyes are full of red lace

my wrists alloyed with copper,
my body fallen into chinoiserie,
so let me collect, talis qualis,

small sins in a tin box
postcards under shoes in a cupboard,
as the breaking of my shell is

the looking at pictures through a window,
bits of the past, calls on a dead line,
everything gone but not gone.