granite escarpment
crimped
veterbrae – granite
crown
balding scalp
trees dead trees –
wombat hole
eyes glancing – fictional
fixity over plains
the wind caresses
like a heavy-handed lover
his pliant better half –
flyaway tent fly – rubbish
squalls eddying
with tea-leaf clairvoyance
over sound
waves weeping wounds –
the tarpaulin
ramparts rise –
the wig at my feet the wig
whose green hairs I’ve heeled
from their caustic
polypropylene
roots with every loose
every static stampede lies
on a dance floor white
as robes – itself a prone
escarpment –
and seems to me an ersatz
hill – hill
and escarpment and human beings
trading places –
and like an upstart
third millennium animism
up-swells after stony stillness
like water poured on sand
I feel my foothold sucked
towards the centre
of the earthen littoral
the fathomless earthen sea
clambering – crowded – crowding –
clambered over – red is what I see
hear taste foretell – red
monsters unlit unvarnished –
the gas bottle glockenspiels
still smell faintly of gas
the bouncy ball stick-ends
are marbled and smell
of deep ecology’s death –
the clasps on their backwards caps
frame scalps limpid sky bald –
if lost in the forest
walk apace toward the kick drums
or if lost in the forest
at night, go and find
the source of the lights cast
specter-like through the deadwood maze –
steer clear
of the hills
of the holes
of the escarpments
of the skulls
of the eyes
of the vertebrae.
***
a mud fleece covers my chest
like the clouds an ochre moon
too bright for all but sidewise
admiration – too big to be ours –
balled and interwoven in the hairs
roiled in the sprinkler’s ceaseless mist
rolled out like bread dough in her hands
spread like a sacrament over burning lips –
two heads on my shoulders
eight legs cast like fishing lines
over the edge of the open canopy
mine straddling the tow bar, forming
a secret obelisk, and breaths
locked in cold suspension
lost in the humming air
as I too am lost and weary
my thoughts nothing but tired transcripts
of scant, fast-forgotten actions –
how long do we listen to the paleness
and grow paler, how long to the icy
synthetics, permafrost atmospherics –
long enough that to think of the outside
is to think of the outside ending –
of tidal upsurges of total unmaking
blue-gold shimmers of last lifecycles –
her hypnic jerks
her pins and needles
quake in me as though my fortune lines
were flagging faults
and there were naked villages inside
and endless forests –
every pine needle-carpeted canopy
a bed for eternal rest – before the nadir
the zenith described by the shapes
our freezing bodies draw –
translucent bodies – on the shapes
of the saintly space enshrouding them –
those secret etchings burnished
with
cold
with
unwashed hair
with
the him
with
dreamless sleep’s pearlescent shellac –
with
the her
with
mud-caked reflections
with
forgotten reflections
with beauty more monumental
than can be countenanced with anything
but the gravest fear –
when I am terrified of how beautiful things are
I know for certain that things are beautiful.
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