Your name once
spry on my lips,
quick to upend the
silence,
 
now hangs
like cord on
tattered driftwood,
 
tastes of
three lost syllables
marooned by a passing tongue.
 
Somewhere I imagine
a dactyl roams sunward,
skin luminescent,
cartilage translucent,
joint-severed,
tumbling like garbled speech.
 
A moment before
the last filament of vowel
is snatched by a swooping
flare,
 
I glimpse from my window,
turning from remembrance -
a lucent stranger,
ashed into the moonless ether.