Tossing the Sticks

If it is getting colder, I am grateful

although I know that such a mercy won't stay,

because we've tossed the sticks.

We've tossed the sticks and now

we have to read them.

And I snapped those twigs in the night meadow.

I moved those rocks beneath the tent

and woke up raining.

Woke up sweating beneath spattering rain,

woke up from a terrible dream,

the stirring

of deep animal discomfort.

(Mosquitos will feed on the legs

of every lover. They always have

and always will.)

I scrape a scanty barrel these days,

these end days, although we all can agree

that it's always seemed like end days

to the species that invented apocalypse.

I will face this apocalypse with

my salty eyes.

And if I seem hard, it is because

I am hard. I am hardened. In time,

I've been shanked by a bone knife.

I very narrowly made out with my life.

In my strange dream,

there is no room for dead weight.

In my strange dream, I have

a hurricane lamp in my chest.

In my strange dream, I have

a hurricane lamp for a heart.  

A Meadow at Night

I am having the sensation

of a thing lost. 

A greater losing,

like losing a star,

it was small but 

the whole sky bereft is huge 

and aching. 

The pressure drags behind my eyes,

like calming a dog down 

before thunderstorm, 

autumnal pressure.

And meadows at night are still,

meadows at night are still meadows.

Somebody showed me a crystal ball

which reflected the world upside down. 

And it was beautiful that way, 

skewed vision, still a 

meadow at night.

I stuffed you with moss 

and all at once you were

alight and crackling.

Pull my nightgown above my head

as if it were night itself.

I will reveal the truer shape of things,

like daybreak. 

I'm only gnawing bones, anyway, 

only stitching lacerations,

only cradling bare feet like a broken

vestal, 

one that threw wide the doors 

and freed the sacrifice