THE FRAME POEM

THE FRAME the frame of rosewood and ebony empty till the eye fills it with the image of a man sitting motionless on a bench as the falling leaves slowly bury him another man sees blackbirds grubbing under the elms after a hard rain beaks spotted with acid drippings old men see the whispers of ghosts pass from life eternal to a myth etched on a Byzantine silver plate they crawl across vast flats of eroded stone till their hands swell and blur into the far horizon a woman saw a colored music there a figure receding in the tapestried hall of an Eastern lamasery after death the victim would remember how the frame showed the shadow of the blinds cut across the killer's face ERIC BASSO April 24, 2012