My Sisters of the Moorland
It’s possible I died standing up,
twelve swallows to the wind
each one like a mansion in the sky.
As a boy the sky leaned on me,
and I wrote tiny tales in tiny books
and dressed our kingdom in toy colors.
Before I walked invisible
my sisters read my skull,
each bump and swell a tug-of-war
of howling yellow and arsenic green,
my attic-dwelling and unmade bed—
organs of wonder and credulity unseam’d.
It’s possible I died standing up,
the wool comber combing my wool
in soothing syrups
my sisters of the moorland
fording rivers,
each finger like a crayfish
in the barrows of my black crown.
Millefleur
Somewhere
past the market square
we talk of the forest’s undressing,
how clear spots beget clear spots—
the runnels like mothers’ sighing.
When you’re in a mood
of optimism
and terrible forgetting
you say the forest is erasure,
blackout to be clothed again
in malachite and verdigris
gilded gradations of glazed red lake,
a thousand flower tapestry
with bite marks
where the tendrils are attached.
Glad Days
Afraid of what the world will do
you feed the birds in your white cotton dress
like Aquinas tousling with the good ending,
pulling back your hair, tying back your hair
as if you know how many angels dance on the head of a pin,
as if you know that fingernails grow after the resurrection.
Those were the glad days. The birds were not machina
& our outermost house was a pageant of Prussian blue.
How quickly the whales belly up.
Draw the curtain, the farce is played
kiln baked, blood stoned, sentenced to hang
the moon is a brew of hellebore
Albion rose, sepal sore
how quickly the stars throng numberless
& now birds pick at flames washed ashore.
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