Votives:

Votives:

Those Candle Stubs

Burned for Our 1^st Anniversary

Now they're fat wax stubs three fingers high; an unsustainable

                breath smothering the thin wicks weak as children’s snowmen  

                sticks in winter, little limbs splintered from the sugar
                maples, fingers broke off in the last wind's-up aha.

Or now, the gone fallow fatty suet-to-tallow-to-suet unsalvageable,

                especially to finches and jays, crumbs stuck in the bent  

    wire trap outside the door, made of the rent come-to-shore

    bare-from-the-storm lobster pot, combed, now cut,

now bent to this new will, and hanged.  I’ve given up, unsated,

                trying to dig it out of itself, the wick, that is, fixed

                between anniversary revivals to light it, forgetting the

                last teeny bead of flame sucking for substance, suffocated

now on oxygen.  The black tips keep lapsing, a miosis-of-the

                the light, like owls in the bright day, how I've seen the way

                they tuck their faces away in the trees

                beneath the paused, speed-preened wings  Not unknowingly,

now I go out holding both votives that have come under

                the fire of their own temper (I’ve held them long enough

                I suppose) exposing, unlit of course, their only scopes of knowing

                their way home when day turns her shoulder over, back-to,

then shudders when the wind picks up, and blames, understandably,

                the extinguishing (even if it happened twenty

                or so years ago) on the wind itself, not the maker, not
                the giver.  I’ve kept them though, like sinner's petitions given

now to minor saints, those griefs at a grave and flame's somehow, unbelievably,

                deliberating its way from match to fuel.  Enough wax.
                Enough wick.  And on a rock as small as this, they are two eyes.
                They are the size of liberty coins. Again, I try lighting them.