With me older and grown less whole.

With me weary and self-soiled.

And admittedly unaccountable.

Far here from home that never was my home.

Down dull yellow strands,

Down roiling yellowed beaches.

That grinding, elder flywheel of shattered memory.

The liminal tumult that breaks hope and dreams alike,

indifferent and in equal measure,

as if only so much granite.

Between the stone and the whirlpool

would I betray myself

in a guise a little less than shunned Circe's ire.

I would so sink the world.

But I alone would go a-foundering.

Swine and a woodpecker and heads of seven snarling dogs.

Too, these oddly placid lions

and wolves that show their throats.

I am all those, witch and bewitched.

Drowned and, likewise, drowning brine.

I am all those.