After Akhmatova

The wick lit on bedside cabinet only illumines one shadow now,
what can I do but read old letters, jaundicing young pulps.

The lit-braid-wick —a pious man burned bald upon a pyre— like a head 
cast down, learning novel scripts fathomed inchoate.

Even the quill to write this smudges, perhaps I should search for another 
who can emboss airs with a gravid lilt of tongue. 

Yet despair will not abate, only be a perforate
like holes snatched by aphid swarm upon a forest leaf,