Monday, September 22, 2014

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.  

Friday, September 19, 2014

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 


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