Things come down to nothing.
Things wind down. The cold blows down—
it always does—
into those bare
spaces of mind. Clouds lower
over the brow of the horizon
and the road goes nowhere,
not north, south, or forward.
Where will you go, and how
will you get there?
What will roll back the stone
of the hour and rewind the senses
back to the dour ground
beneath your feet, the indifferent flow
of wind?
How will you ever atone
for the fear that halts your steps
and that stops your tongue?
You must go
the whole way down.
You must stand in the colorless dawn
until the dream you can
almost remember has run ahead
and left you to follow alone.—
By dead reckoning, you must
grope your way down
and on.
Priscilla Frake is the author of Correspondence, a book of epistolary poems. She has work in Verse Daily, Nimrod, The Midwest Quarterly, Medical Literary Messenger, Carbon Culture Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and The New Welsh Review, among others. She lives in Sugar Land, where she is a studio jeweler.