©1999 by Zofia Burr  All rights reserved.

Humours
 Zofia Burr

[L]ead is a material different from all other materials, a metal which you feel is tired, perhaps tired of transforming itself and that does not want to transform itself anymore: the ashes of who knows how many other elements full of life, which thousands upon thousands of years ago were burned in their own fire. ÛPrimo Levi
 
/
A star's last life as lead
is in working
the rock whose closed
 
weight seems dead
but instead is full
of deception
 
/
to absorb those perils it has lived
hidden all of the lives it has
under a skin of glass to reflect
 
/
you may weigh it against the tangle
that our dead are,
worn through like old skin
who knows how many other
elements in their own transformations
once wore.
 
/
what's left will be
wrought of the course
memory follows
 
after those shapes it took after

/
what's left then is liquid
as feeling, elastic
as flesh.
 
/
past dissolution go likewise
open as matter's most constant
resolve
 
continue to installation...

© 1999 Zofia Burr  All rights reserved.