Gray
by Cameron Price
Runestone, Volume 1 

Gray 

when brother came back
from the country of our dead father,
gray fog leaked from his ears

it wreathed his face, tightened his collar, blinded his eyes
I watched him, afraid of his darkness.

at night when he opens his mouth, a blanket of dead stars
roll out like clocks, each frozen at the witching hour

he had been the bright one : 
a splinter of light in a dense cloud but
sleeping in our father’s grave had turned his life to stone

now he pulls cords of fog around him,
mute like the purple depths of the sea
his marrow frozen into ancient amber,
his sharp eyes grating the iron sky into toxic dust,
the heavens falling into pieces like a decrepit house

what but stones can bear the petrifaction of the living dead :
where is the sermon of hope to wake us from
the dust, when only fossilized bones
emerge from the fog?