By Night I Loosed Clay Ghosts

Cross-legged on the hot wooden floor at
the mouth of my fire I watch reds and oranges
stain my paper-white clay. Fingertips test
the earthen veins flowing, rivers and creeks
across the landscape of this faux-mortality
with which I conjure.
Beyond the glow of the hungry hearth
a corpse-gray frost spreads moldlike over
my walls and I can taste again the
sour sweetness of unnatural air
before
             it
                  appears
                              on the stairs between places
like a held breath before an unformed word.
I go to it, curious, searching
as I always am
for a piece of the unbaked clay of creation
that I may mold it as God molded me.
Within its paperskin body I observe
no human mechanisms of heart and lungs;
no spreading power of breath and
no thrumming rhythm of pulse.

Brittle and solitary and aglow with light,
it smells of coal and mud and animal. It
moves and bends and tests its chalky mudflesh.
Moves, I observe, with life. But lifeless.
Where is its voice? With what instrument
does this hollow body resonate? Does the wind
rush through it and make it sing like a flute?
Do the limbs of it clack in the breeze like
polished rabbit bones strung into a wind chime?

It looks at me with its eyeless face, breathes
with its lungless chest, cries out with its
voiceless throat. In the graying silence
I understand it is not life but pain and
I do not want to know if this thing is
mud-born, god-born or torn from the
skin of the night. I do not want to learn
the color of its breath or the warmth
of its blood, and so I gather up my conjuring
and into the fire it vanishes, chewed by
crimson teeth. And from that hellish lightplace
rises a single echoing wail—its cry like the
scream of sinking ships, a chill carried on
restless air into my throat to die there
within the unworthy instrument of my voice.