The Sentinel of the Dead

Because it sees time going by when nothing

else does, it will grow old without witness.

Straight enough and strong, its timbers shall twist,

nevertheless, into knotty, pale scales.

Someone lives there, and her curtains curtsy 

sharply smart, smeared in rational light,

while she couches amidst the proper squeaks and slivers,

and the air tastes of wooden troughs and fires. 

Around the curve it squats, purpose-built,

muttering mythic oaths at passersby,

attic thoughts, memento mori at an ambush. 

Swooning branches, rational lights, while above

bides the crypt of a dim and splintery mind,

ineffable, dusty, dark and diagnostic.