Worm-black turret,
suspended in its occupation
of the surrounding fields.
Barbed dawn
scripts the night,
little prince evasive
in the dark sweet
of away.
The pilgrims’ stations
thrill like
paper banners
to the rise and fall
of an hour’s worth of wind
and daylight.
Goddess,
pooled in a startled eye.
River bottom dredged
as the missionaries
escalate,
kilt and Bible
stamping to the
sweet revenge, of
boats marooned in fire
that wharves
and timbers
braise from,
to crash through
to smoke
and poisonous water.
A wall of oliphants
disgorge, delouse from
under a shaggy hill’s
coronet of
tumbledown flossgreen stone.
Breath tara-tan-taras
the mist,
bridal to the bog’s
gessoed tarp,
purged
with a diet of books and
unexpected-because-presumed-extinct
birdcalls.