Leonardo Drawings

A bony centipede on vellum.
Quick, vulturine penstrokes hunch
and gather, picking, picking at sums.

His inky thumbprint on the sacrum
where a name was stripped away
to bare the shared decay of form:

heart in its blue, mottled ocean,
sagging like a rotted fruit
tangled in heaps of mangrove vein;

hobbit door of shy tricuspid
swinging shut in a bloody tide,
that feral sanguinary burrowing

hidden in every side.

Copyright © 2003 K. E. Duffin All rights reserved
from Chelsea
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission