Sentry

There are stranger things
than sang-froid ladies with pendulum minds.
Look you now,
with well prepared eyes of night
to see that smitten sentry skulk,
nature revealed by the full and teasing moon.
Fore born by the weight of experience
and the ashen border left on lips.
Bitterness is an old companion
who serves easily recollected meals
and bids you pick your teeth with tiny bones.
He plays the tragedian,
chalk tears roughly drawn and smudged
with meager dew,
the only moisture he can use or imagine.
The lusty sun will have that too
so he sheds nothing that men could say was his.
If doom laid hand on doom
pledging strange protection
then this dry creature would be a sentry still.