Horizon on fire, then day made bare,
to see what the dark had done.
The run-off stank rancid with nightspill,
the crumbled well sat utterly still, vined
and girdled, wildflowers heavy at the ulcerated
tips. A mixture of lush and backwash and
the citrus phase of rot.
The afternoon would
shift shadows down the valley’s blue corridor,
the blasted stones reddening like peeled skin.
A skitter of beetles italic over ancient soot.
Winds locked up since childhood now leaped
the caving wall, tipped the unwary off balance,
slithering towards a human voice.
Gravel glistened in a binge of rain,
furnishing the rhythm of ends made precious.
Trees bowed their heads together in an orgy
of flailed branches. Slipped from its tether
the wind spun till sore, and slowed,
drunk and dizzy as a child. Rain tapered
through the beaten grove, left behind a
long tattoo of drops, from branch to leaf to
ground. Agile paws and jealous eyes knit shut
the swollen afternoon, thunder like a clatter of stones.
An orphan sapling dripped off,
the grass trembling with bruised shadows.
* * *
Birds flew the straight line of the canal,
into, over the city, sweet rain driving
before them, delta narrowing to the human
outposts like a green skirt, waist belted
with an aqueduct.
They sailed above the scurries,
racing the circuit of their chosen cage.
The clouds folded upon themselves,
changing the color of the stones below.
They veered in deuces like messengers on
zealous wings, no nest till throat was purged.
They cried the purl and caw of sights seen,
translating into busy gardens the nervous news.
Sky dropped heavy around them
as they negotiated the yawn of light,
the cramped, closing light.
Country cousins, savagely scattered, the
rivers and lakes a mangle of animals and iron.
Birds blamed rats, themselves impelled
to migrate, thanks to river monsters
made homesick in a country of short nights.
* * *
Set, with a firm wallop, between
salt’s grace and pepper’s fearlessness.
Thrown bottles gashed wide the perfect
day, mowed down the motley bunting,
bowled to tinkled fragments at the feet
of chocolate goddesses, coffee gods.
A puff of breath to pulse the shrouding,
while ghost melismas shied and shivered,
note by beady note and rising from a huddle
to a wail.
Leather creaked in a smother of balsa,
a shout to turn all the plain to glorious stage.
The carriage careened its pilotless route,
the map torn at a vital joint,
with erasure and contraction knotted
to a commonwealth fussy with insect logic.
An out-of-doors table was hugely laid,
floral and wild, arranged so that sweat
shimmered like dowry, bride cupping
herself in approved delight,
fruit withering in the wind and heat.
* * *
String music of nails trinketing loose
from wood. Ribs groaned, blew the hulls
wide as bladders, lungs jolting in the
scarce air, the heavenly weight streaked
with counterfeit stars.
From an upright line, fringed with mane,
the bends were calculated in swift
strokes, flaws captured in ellipses,
dotted shell-like where surf broke down,
coughing up broken pearls.
The eyes of every beast singed to tears,
smoke and dust the red irritants
in a color-mad, upside-down world.
The sea began to boil, an ant succeeding
the vacant eye.
Tracing paper and the
prick of genius or sorcery, thunderclouds
detonating offshore, an arrow lining up
in sympathy with the skipper’s mast,
targets hopping the simmered ring.
A picnic of bitter berries and a trace
of parsley, hunger’s recondite palate
shocked to a pause, palmprints staining farewell.
And a carpet of bones, pacific on the baize meadow.
* * *
The monotonous madding of a world
pulled down.
Victory tore at her painted
cheeks, howled in the doorway coffining the
crowded house. Trumpets blasting the ruined
plaza, pitched like arrows into shin and heels,
hunting along the public stairs, a wide-
fanned wander folding all before it.
Smoke softened the tattering of drums,
light shivered as though raped.
Plugged ears and nostrils to see
the optical harmony holding. A crowd
slow-clapping the departing back,
choleric prince and razor-tongued dandy,
melee erupting round a latecomer’s
dodge and shift. The midday prayer,
half-whine, half-rave, the chorus
of rage and rattle. Peering down
upon the impudent mob,
counted on to cheer each skillful incision.
One crown above all, a kissed forehead
pale in the whip of brambles. The newly-
wounded showed their ribbons, stepped
carefully between the bright and fallen.
* * *
Flasked against chills, seasonal workers
gathered in the dark to watch the house burn,
long and entire. The dollhouse walls convulsive
as bricks fell inwards, stubbling the smoke
into popping morse, a voyeur’s tour of some
marine and drunken world. Gatewise, the
housing cheeks went rosy, mutinous with outrage,
the air a fidget from hot roof to black and
cauterized grass. First a trestle, then a singing
shank, to serenade the fire’s own pitchy flange.
Gibbous and leveling, a ghost-sheet rippled
above the olive-grove, aura in its gale,
fringe of orange and rose reflecting the burning house.
Lightning hid its filament,
the stones retired to the lakebed,
the stoked winds pined.
A mirage of abduction in moonlit vines,
the dry clang of shears, the thump of blades
scissoring in earth, the droll clench of a snarling fawn.
The olive-thief called decoy, scrambled
free of battery, burnoose loony in the treetops,
climbing into shelter as moon leveled out.
* * *
Bloodless lips jeweled with mnemonic scars,
trimming sharp words from icicle to melt.
The exuberance of surrender beggared
the hangdog chill, a harness of thorns
set the frost to rout. Climbing up
towards a cold and hollow shelter,
each one wore the shame-flush on skin,
the ache of lust veined in hooded eyes.
A pile of scalps and the drained archive
passed and barely noted.
Doubt was a luxury for those exposed on the
glacis, the weeping sky dropping like a net.
Below, a crowd of masts, null the wee harbor.
* * *
Fetishes and talismans, hung knocking in
their hair-skeined splinters, to drive
ghosts away, or slyly distract them.
Twigs bound with homemade twine, nothing
random in the piece-count. Echoing the rings
of the many-murdered tree, stump daubed with
a childish tangerine stripe, mapping some past
ambush or love-nest, warning away the dreamy
woodsman halted by a fallow pipe.
The forest shifting
to bear the light, the blaze of littered rinds.
Breath, caught and released, fading by the blue
hush where the cranes took soundings,
swiveled by the imitators from a stride of
last leggings. Not a place to rest one’s beauty in,
gouged round the edges with lachrymose stone,
and a dry trench in grand and scenic comma.
The sun was the poor arbiter to such a one-
sided argument, the wind’s low moan
against the precision of glass-veined leaf.
Turning, and floating away, fear like a current
of uprushing wind, peeved in its curious sport.
Staggered by a blindside hit, the tap
of the killjoy sling, the silhouette stouting
to the top of the hill, then gone over portly.
Suspicion bade a worm’s remorse, head bluntly down.
Come dawn it would have bled for hours,
a small pool of strong drink. Light through the trees
looked for opportunity, dreamed of retreat
and blurred to the spanning edge.
* * *
The little god was dabbed his share,
limestone’s curve a glutton’s paunch.
Sponge, or brush, or fingerpads when time ran
stingy, each the special fizz of nursing stone.
Risking wasp, inviting rebuke, an old believer
snuck back to char the ashy pince-nez
from the crippled god’s astounded face,
two cherubs to form an O, a blessing’s afterthought.
* * *
Mud walls, slant with sun, and shade
in pools beneath the segregate trees.
A diced lemon was a grenade of bookish
memories, as clean as the crunch of gravel,
mules laboring the gloom of blue shade.
The rainless year proved rough on credulous
travelers, gently turned away, refused
without appeal. Monkey-faced babies
cradled in the palm-leaf hammocks,
watchful swaddle of older siblings, rabbiting
from rivalry to cusp.
Nature’s gripe ends as water in a jar,
gathered easily from among red stones.
Shakes rappel the ancient spine, a teaser
bells the nerves, the gelid shell of wrinkled
skin a punishment of stripes.
Twin blunderers,
man and shadow, for whom such one-time ease
peels pain with memory’s knife. A whisper
of cosset and spoil, flung high in mocking
summons, tunics stretched over bony frames,
deep-dyed a tea’s new red.
Thin hungered for a fat shadow, the
command to nurse emptied into silence.
Merchants took turns entertaining nomads
beneath the broad sweep of awnings, making
the most of sullen circumstance, goats
amid the cucumbers, hail-spotted paddocks.
The deepest pool was always the coldest,
one’s teeth chattering as the summer landscape steamed.
A tarnished buckle dilated the sky-blue eye,
the caravan left few behind.
* * *
Winter sat alone on the silver field.
To illustrate the pout eroticism of apples,
a wine glass with its fiddled stem.
The clouds were rags, belligerent banners
frayed apart by the racing broad-shouldered wind.
A sieve-pan banged, hooked on its
mourning stretch of clothesline. The hillside,
flayed and scraped, gleamed bauxite
through its wounds. The barometer
printing a steady fall, the wine glass filled,
the audience dismissed.