sad, dimensionless dream
mirror black, mirror night
mindless fish tread their
sepal dragonscales
over swathes of water’s
membrane
I am
hunted again
not daring
to breathe
rivered here nor there my ghost
hands star-touched and eternal
with a childhood’s loneliness I
scatter like so many
moths solitary blue
& bewinged
remembering not so much of the furrow
but that yellow-coffin silence
like so much wheat lost and
rotting to war-gnawed fields
no, blanched bone
I have been soured by arrows
the stir of uncoiling sea-beasts
that clamor with cloven black feet
towards uncertain land
that was my own, once
before the bog-eyed kelpie
maimed the sugared soul
and kept its tiny
shattered pieces
belonging to shadow
language which sends ravens
through the wild fir: I cannot afford
your indifference
the cool touch
of your slack hand like
death in the earthen branches
like a lover I slip from the moon’s
cerement, I become instrument
figurative as wind, or roan wood-dreams
that are at once held and forgotten
can I or will I? unfix such
wounds again, my final belongings
the unendurable strangeness of
looking upon an earth too changed
and shaped by his hands bloodied
with violation
I will make it mine again, or let it
be nothing
so long as waking begets its own
monstrous silver, eos, as my own
garden
estranged
this is survival, and nothing more
the tending of this thin and dire thread
to which my whole life
now belongs
it no longer matters what these fields
had been but that they are, as I am
sundered open, emptied like the flesh beneath
the wicked hooks of a dawn-hot sun
whatever else it is
I cannot bear to say any more
