Double

In umbral hours – crepuscule’s bruise – he ran,
A fugitive from footprints of his own began;
He chased the wind’s perjured, peripatetic vow,
Retreating from himself (how now outruns a now?).
Behind him kept a double – doppel, doux, and dim –
A hush with hands, a hem of him, a synonym.
Unbroken mirror, echo without end or seam,
A solecism stitched into the grammar of his dream.

The sky, once whole, split open – syntax torn –
A wound of weather, red as words misborn;
Its crimson veil unspooled, a hemorrhaging light,
As if the world wept verbs for his nouned flight.
Across salt fields and seas that rhymed with flee,
He thought the shadow’s pace could not keep me;
Yet distance dwindled – no decrement accrued –
How outrun what lives inside the interlude?

At last the slope, a cliff that yawned like law,
He turned; the wind confessed what winds foresaw:
The abyss sang basso profundo below,
A long lament in re – red sky, iron do.
There on the edge, breath balanced – fear/release –
A colon poised between escape and peace.
The twin stood fast, fate’s footnote, tacit, true,
No threat pronounced – catachresis grew.

Then time congealed. The truth came tidal, old:
By fleeing the double, he’d forfeited the gold.
What is escape that amputates the core?
What flight that leaves the soul upon the floor?
The specter only mirrored what he’d missed –
The chase was chain; the prison was the fist.
Irony grinned: to run was to remain,
A paradox with legs, a leash called gain.

With a sigh – deep, seasoned, almost kind – he knew:
In fleeing the false, he’d orphaned the true.
So wordless now (logos laid aside),
He stepped into the red – adiós, au vide.
Where the twin could follow no farther than name,
Where self, unbroken, waited – same as same.
Here end the rhymes, yet meaning starts anew:
He fell into himself, and thus withdrew.