Tom of Bedlam

Whiteness is all that ill remembered man conjures,
as if a spectre took over his shadow.
That man, parchment pallor stained like the
maggot-white mulberries as they rub rouge among the bramble.
Summer had grown old, sidled past autumn,
slid into the winsome wintry wilderness and stilled there.
He was trapped, frost on the spider web,
lost in a civil warren under a spell that deceived
none but him and I.
He was Ol' Tom O' Bedlam.

What witnesses those black branches were,
bent down by February snow towards his balding head.
When night fell dark,
such a glamour was cast by blue twilit lights
and opalescent cloud, that he could not
deny the royal call,
calling him to wing, sleep-feathered,
across the white canvas.

Light, like an envious widow, peers through
the gap between fluttering flakes;
they catch in his white hair, like a crown,
his off-white skin is becoming a death sheen
of black-blue.

I see him tack down, arms spread as if
on a beam reach. His stumbling trot stiffened,
stone shod, arthritic.

I left.
Because there was only him and I.