Landscape For a Good Prisoner

1.

Adopted into years that never lay
so frozen as when, ancient in our
mutual, deficient administration,

we hove, chill in the bother of a disliked,
industrious year, little in our knowing,
now north, now forty, one bad arm and one

affable brain between us, timeless and
undulate, close in to the guard of icy,
un-shedding trees.

2.

We never made it out, really – the years
of awaiting the years, storms, anybody’s
blessing – the bedsteads attacked with jacked-up

hacksaws as they arrived - the tellers, ancient
and beloved, of our mutual and
deficient administration led back,

chastened and unmistakably turned. Anybody’s
young skywriting, you once said, from the outside,
our harmless glasses sought to know, but lost

in fields of unappeasable trying,
a tardy utterance admits of nothing
once good.

3.

Sick with yards of aching, our own guards now
hustle in adopted years hustle, unlove fixed
in nothing, eyes little in their sure knowing.