Costumes: Groovy Girl, Bun-Bun, and Bordello

Maternal grandma bought the blanket,
Typically tacky, overpriced, under-thought
Gift from grandma, the kind drove Mama crazy.

Scarlet, artificial, satiny on one side, fluffy
As a feather boa on the other. Mama
Derisively named it "the bordello blanket,"

But it was immediately loved by Sukha.
Before long she would sleep under nothing else
But "bordello," fuzzy side down. Linus

Was scarcely more attached to his blanket.
This went on for a couple of years, until
The parents themselves forgot the creepy

Implications of calling a little girl's blankie
"Bordello," shouted casually at rest stops
By the highwayside on long drives, "Have you seen

Her bordello?" Everything is just a thing in the end,
No matter how we tried to constrain it by name.
Then, there was the garish pink stuffed bunny

With outrageously outsized ears, entirely synthetic
Fluff, also from grandma, that morphed from "grandpa rabbit"
To velveteen reality, to a boy bunny, to "bun-bun,"

Who eventually became a girl, replete with a name
As long as her worn, occasionally laundered ears,
"Bun-Bun Pearl Daisy Daffodil Athena Jeffreys,"

Just one of us, as ridiculously and hopelessly
Slathered in unstable nouns and genres as everyone.
Don't get me started on the arrival of "Groovy Girl."

Culture Changes

"By frequent dissections gain a perfect knowledge of that other world which is man."

It's October. It's going to get colder.
You're not under the Southern Cross
And headfirst Orion the Hunter
Anymore, soldier. You're norther.

Don't care what hand the statisticians
Predicted most likely to win.
That's not the hand you're living in.
Any given moment now, a bullet hurtles. Been

Downhearted ever since the day bereft,
Ever since the day bereft of someone
Willing to shill the ghost of someone else.
The rule of awe gathers dust on the shelf.

Nowhither

"Alas, how long ago this morning seems this evening!"

Lunch breaks I drink beer, read books, and write poems.
That's all the wisdom I have about that.
Day breaks and I'm likely as not awake, hoping
To have some moonlit morning to myself,
And that's all I can know about that.
Night breaks over the cliffs of Zion, scattering
Sparks of colored lights on the anvil of West Temple,
Conflating near and bright with dim, old, far,
Farther than anything I can imagine about that.
I break, and the surprise of the familiar reminds me,
Nothing anything can do about that.

Humanity's Incomplete Memoir Composed of One Thousand, Seven Hundred, and Forty Syllables, Exactly, Plus One

A great while ago the world had not yet begun,

Or a great while gone the world was over and done.

What you have to keep down in the hold of that thought

Are the differences, facing away from the sun,

In infinitely divisible: only one.

Everything you are is something that you were taught

Had to be, couldn't possibly be as it ought.

The atoms, sands, gems on the miraculous shore

Shining with story's cruel weapons, cunningly wrought,

Are trivial, repetitive, and gods' whole plot.

It's all transmutable, incorruptible ore,

This shifting, reducing, incompletely sieved store

Of entropy's golden granary, forever

Finer equilibria, ever less is more

Or less ever distant from the shadowless door. 

You would like, I know, plainer language, but never

Was the jargon of your slang-slung present ever

Anything any tongue could spit clear of the past

Entanglements descended from other clever

Entanglements descended from myths, whatever 

Brains have to do to a brain to make the mind last.

Cursing's archaic as euphemistic hold fasts.

It's only to embellish my language, said John.

Generations of thieves stealing from thieves, outclassed

By the weird endurance of what's stolen: contrast.

A great while ago the world was already gone,

Our best ideas stolen by ancestors. Gods yawned 

And stretched their frames on Newton's particles of light,

Then slept in tents and dreamed of rosy-fingered dawn,

Battles prophesied, monsters slain by monstrous brawn.

There was not is not will not ever be delight. 

Kaikias, nor'easter, attracts the clouds tonight.

A monkey, all it does is beshit and ruin.

Life is a pet to give black-holed galaxies fright,

A peculiar appurtenance for what's not right.

That was random, said the student, long gone, who, in

An effort to shame the professor and loosen

The ligatures binding her, attempted escape

Via the time-honored madness of those truant

Souls who long to be departed, flown, winds' true win.

She didn't succeed. It's never successful. Rape

Is the strategm, inherited from the Cape

Of Good Hope, around which ancestors assembled,

Hungry, wherever were the most convenient caves

And spoke, as speak we all yet must. Gods have a shape 

That we gave them as we gave them, as we trembled

With fearful, terrible dreams that we resembled

The features of the divine, nothing we hated

More, everything we knew we had to let crumble

With age and time and neglect, the final temples.

A great while ago, all the world's hopes conflated.

The pointless poet, soul of nothing, orated

Before an angry crowd of gentlemen. The dark

Rain, sweet as it was in evening air, abated.

Time for gods to own up to what's been created.

Here is what Atra-hasis took on board his ark:

Every last word that could be encoded as marks,

So that the myth of life--maintenance, waste, and lies--

Could be preserved to reinfect the world. A lark,

Not a raven, not a dove, came back with the spark 

Of green in beak, song in throat, of the world outside

The little madness that is how the truth survives.

A great while ago, the world converged on the back

Of a hapless thing, rudely great and darkly wise.

Black, torqued lines, concentrating: what is is what tries.

Somewhere where you won't exist, you're under attack.

What was all of your life, bone, for others's a snack.

You would gather your skirts and squat down in the gloom,

But you've been gone so long now, the world's bric-a-brac 

Barely ashes your detritus. What's left is lack,

And you've not been invited to comment. Your womb

Was between your ears and bore gods and monsters, doom

In every narrative that didn't pretend loss

Was a kind of pause or exchange rate. The warped loom

Of ideas on which you racked worlds has no more room.

What thou lovest well sinks with the rest of the dross.

Nothing will not be reft from thee. That is the cost

Of over-stuffing memory in the first place,

Encoded, packed small, notes on foxgloved pages lost

In the fire that comes from compression, from dried moss

Like those delicate examples you used to space

Out as decorations to dress up the disgrace

Of a gone world going down long unwinding roads

On the dashboard of your truth, your engine of grace

Chugging along, for now, fed, oiled, and then replaced.

The rule of do what you will you'll never follow

No matter how many overruled failures goad

A departure from what will happen every time.

After the night's mare, the moon in the morning showed

Silver universes of reflection that glowed.

How comes the devil then to be so loath to climb

Down the ladders of cavern chimneys cloaked in grime?

Funny old thing, the pattern of surprise, the joy

Of an ever renewable innocence, time,

The advanced leglessness coiled in the common slime.

It takes narrative expenditure, this quick toy,

This arrival at a mingled shape, an alloy

Like the riddle poems Gargantua could compose

And recite or pretend to ignore. Topless Troy

Was a cute companion of any stable boy.

Slowly, slowly all hidden things will be exposed,

Emerge into the light and appear to be close,

Bright, here, and now before disappearing for good.

How to tell the hidden from the lost? No one knows, 

Despite unscrolling caricatures that propose

Spackling black gaps with bland pretend facts. No one could.

Small conceals and terrifies smaller. The dark wood

In which monsters content themselves with hunting dreams

Is itself a tattered, moth-eaten rug that should

Slip off the stones and sink into the sea and would

Do so. Nothing's speechless. Everything's as it seems.

Our degringoladia in excelcis gleams

From the illuminated manuscripts that drain

Out of every eclipse's reflections on beams

From every simultaneous gloaming, the streams

Of every coronal dawn and sunset all at once, the world, ringed brain,

Pando, the colony organism, the rain

Feeding and darkening the over-entangled

Plot of dirt from which the over-determined pain

Of being a thing feeding on its own refrain,

Which is, I am that I am, however mangled

I might seem, however bedraggled, dark-spangled,

Innumerable legion of disparate things,

However my offshoots can't count, my fire-fangled

Autumn glories dangle down. The truth has strangled

Every more honest lie. Summer's what autumn brings.

The moon and the sun hang from invisible strings

That wrap around their insidious me and you.

Every divinity's a pendulum that swings

In the grooves between human shoulders, human wings.

The combatants walked barefoot in the morning dew,

Holding hands and keeping absurdity in view.

You would never conceive the morning dew was not

Left behind by the violence of being true

To the violent notion that some things are true.

There was a possibility languages caught

That nothing could have grasped, but it's left us distraught.

We talk and talk and gesture and scribble and shun

The thin but unwavering evidence we've bought

A devil's bargain from every demon we've sought.

We crumble, having lost the race we'd thought we'd won,

An island of toppled statues, silent and stunned,

Faint, arrogant smiles still luscious under the sun.

A great while ago our world was over and done.

A great while ago, the world had not yet begun.

No.

The Broken Sonnet

Looks like something else, disturbs
The universe of Shakespeare,
Genghis Khan, caves of fossil
Bones of apes somewhat like us,

The anonymous mothers
Of the original names--
It is not what it appears
To be trying to disguise.

It's a sunny Saturday
When the long gas filaments
Gleaming like clouds in the light
Near the black hole and are gone.

Can information be lost,
Not just hidden or misplaced,
Not knowing just compacted,
Wisdom too dense to displace?

Information's not knowing;
Information's not wisdom.
Knowing's nothing, the nothing
Free, alone, that comes and goes.

Angor animi

The anguished soul, as cultured

As a cheese whose curds have mixed

With mold from loaves left in caves,

Peers out, compound self, from eyes

Fringed with bacterial dust

And despairs before turning

Away. Everything gathered

To witness must dissipate

And transubstantiate. Trace

Remnants kind to forensics

May inform another day,

But the revenants gibber

Without consideration

For themselves or for the selves

That might be formed from pieces

Of the thing no longer them.

The thing considers its end

In the pure concentration

Of that about to consume

The many to become none.

al-'umm al-jāfiya

If it weren't for the beasts we 

Compose as scholarship, we 

Would all live like professors

Pretending not to be beasts

In strange poses, indisposed

By our disposable world.

Laud the old and durable

Over the throw-away wraps

Piling up in the landfills,

But it's all disposable:

Everything to be disposed

To the act of becoming

Other things. Composition

Equals decomposition,

And what we hate about trash

Is its tendency to last

When we so longed to dispose

Of it. Mountainous middens

Arise from life's dreams of life,

Trucks of waste per gram of self.

Stable Entities

When it comes to death, it's as if
All the songs and poems and stories
About sex were penned by virgins

Contemplating the strange prospect,
Except that this transformation
Is not an initiation

Into a new experience
But the end of experience
Itself and of its memory,

Which is all of experience
One ever experiences.
Forms eddy, stable entities

Similar to earlier forms
Of themselves. They don't contemplate
What they'll be when they've never been.

A Young Ghost

"For his gloves, sixteen hob-goblin skins were used, and those of three werewolves for the trimming."

So that really was my last swim.
I think back to when my mother,
My wife, my father were young ghosts.

It's not how long you lived that counts
In that world. How long you've been dead
Is your age. I won't come back here,

I'm afraid. I'll never come back,
A free man, to swim in this lake.
And that's okay. Everything is

Okay in the world of young ghosts,
No one getting any younger
Except when, like ridiculous

Giants spun from breviary
Flasks, we're allowed to start over.
Next nonexistence! Now, begin.

Now Look Down

The constellation Orion
Over the crescent moon rising,
Fire on the side of Pine Mountain,
Otherwise, the sky was iron.

A line, amphisbaena, writhed
On the mountain's misericord.
The red and white Zion sandstone
Browned. Hiding behind it, bronze dawn

Burned its own line, cliff after cliff,
Horizon upon horizon.
The long day traveling upright
In prayer for a merciful night

Rose with the plane and flamed over
The Vermillion Cliffs, the wired, tired,
Paved and irrigated desert,
San Juans' scallops, expired glaciers.

Twenty thousand years since the world
Was cold enough, kept to itself.
The bright metal bird flew halfway
Back up to the dark, an arrow.

Last Summer Day Alone in Zion

I tell no one, but I keep meaning
Never to come back. Why, I can't say.
It's a perfectly lovely small town

In a mostly rich and peaceful land,
Proud of grandiose geology,
The kind of place people strive to reach.

And then, here I am again, thinking
How unlikely it is that I'll be
Back here, at least in this condition,

Ever again. I struggle to mow
The lawn leaning hard on my crutches.
I look up at the Watchman, red-faced

At sunset, the glow of a million
Artfully posed tripod photographs.
I love this place. It doesn't belong

To me or any incoherent
Mythology, save the redolent
Dream of escaping from what we love.

As a Yesterday When It Is Passed, And As a Watch In the Night

Hasn't anyone else noticed
That on Earth at least, everything
Except the decelerating
Planet itself accelerates?

Perhaps it's only perspective,
But I doubt it. The more recent
Remains over-represented;
The deep past should appear lesser.

Instead it extends and extends.
Everything changed more slowly then,
When the Earth rotated so fast
The sun spun around in eight hours.

Here. The first half of life on Earth,
No, at least the first three quarters,
Was given over to oceans
Of single-called organisms.

It's not that there are no fossils.
The fossils are small and boring.
Even granting a late-ish date
For the appearance of real life

And an early date for the start
Of multicellularity,
Three quarters of life's history
Was for free, little cells only.

In another tenth of the time,
Assuming one counts time by years,
Circuits of our spitball around
The distant orange of our sun,

Life had exploded into forms
Elaborate, large, and grotesque.
Those, in another twentieth,
Had finally conquered the land,

Generating forests and wings
Of multiple innovations
And enormous, lumbering things.
Despite mass extinctions, nothing

Much shifted suites of strategies
For another twentieth, then
The luxurious Cretaceous,
Another extinction event,

Whose fault, perhaps, was in the stars,
And there's only a fortieth
Part left now since first emergence
Until the moment I write this,

And that fortieth is the age
Of mammals, the great crescendo
Of complex individuals
Culminating in the Blue Whale,

Largest animal ever was.
But that symphonic explosion
Crested with two one thousandths left
For a new bipedal madness.

And of that two thousandths one half
For recognizable culture,
And of that thousandth, two thirds
For spreading around half the Earth,

And of the third of a thousandth
Remaining, say, four fifths of that
To get to the heart of the us,
Then another nine tenths of that

Heart of us as we are to get
To the lip of anthropocene,
The first half of which was quiet,
Until agriculture took hold,

The first half of which was quiet
Until literacy took hold,
And of the fifty centuries,
Forty the same, only the last

Ten grown, globally, out of hand,
And of those ten, only the last
Two traveling faster than horse,
One flying, and half of one launched

Into monitoring orbits
The last half of a half have turned
Into a single web of mind,
Spinning itself Fibonacci.

The days, however, are longer,
And the dark at the end the same.
Life devours the rock's rotations
Escaping the end of life's games.

Lightship

Survive long enough, and even
In the absence of great ruin--
War, quake, eruption, hurricane--
You will be bound to remember

Buildings you once inhabited
And were sentimental toward
Never to be revisited
Because they no longer exist.

The home your parents took you to
Torn down decades ago, the dorm
Demolished, the hospital wing
Where you were delivered, transformed

Into ten condominiums
Where you grandfather died, bulldozed
After that for a shopping mart.
They haunt your thoughts. They taunt you

With the thought that what's remembered
Is what could be inhabited.
Correct. The buildings you can touch
Are no more what they were than those.

Tentative Wolf

Everyone's God is a good god
Because they're all the same
Under the names. I don't mean

To claim they're all names
For the one, same good God.
I mean all the names are the same.

Whatever you may have exalted
As above all else, however different
In particulars (and I do believe

In the differences of all particulars),
Is not entirely different from divinity
Defined under another name by someone

Else. The differences are the proof
The similarities point to the truth:
The names of the nameless are the name.

The Stars Are Far Beyond Height

I imagine Mr. Bradley
Making measurements night by night,
Seeking out stellar parallax,
The aberration of the light

Discovered, quite to his surprise,
Instead. Instead, that's what it's like
In this corner of a cosmos,
Always the unexpected sight,

Neither magical nor dreamed of,
Only wholly not what the bright
Ideas we had promised we'd find,
Only what we must like, despite.

We've got no choice but to take fright
In constant strangeness, take delight.

Thirty Three Boxes of Light for Sarah

In our base-ten system, the squiggles
Look like a pair of threes, but they mean
Eleven threes, nine implicit, invisibly known.

What's hiding in there? All the Vedic deities,
All the miracles of Jesus, all the degrees
Of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, the Star of David,

The numerical equivalent of Hebrew amen,
Al Ghazali's universal age in Heaven.
Forget all of them. Where were any of them

Thirty-three centuries gone? Nonexistent.
Somewhere in Sumeria, maybe, someone
Had noticed something mystical, symmetrical

About that number, but then again, maybe not.
Can we assume the number has always been
There, regardless of notation or our awareness

Of integers that cannot be expressed as sum
Of different triangular numbers? The protons
In arsenic atoms, the bones in the average spine,

Counting the coccyx, have been around
Long enough to suggest this number
Thirty three is itself, in some sense, ancient,

Intrinsic to our universe. I don't know
How, though, and I don't trust myself.
Counting anything relies on assumptions

That similar things have repeated something
The same. What? Thirty three boxes of light
Are each different, different from each other,

Different from themselves, within themselves,
Different when opening, when open, when shut
Tightly on themselves and sinking into retrospect.

What does a year of a life by those lights
Add to a chain of such demarcations,
Folding their exquisite lenses in to begin again?

That Sounds Like Fun

The world will not get better, 

The world will not get worse,

If you follow the letter

Of the law composing verse.

You can take comfort in that

For yourself. Readers can, too,

When they think, "Done there. Been that."

But it simply isn't true

That a blessing or a curse

Well-written alters matter.

The world will not get worse.

The world will not get better.

Yol Tengri

And out of nothing awake. A monkey
Can read Nietzsche; he just can't understand
What all the fuss is about. Finally,

I feel part of something. On the one hand,
There is the deal for the making. Other?
I have no soul of my own to trade in.

So many things will lie down in the road.
The moon squats at the end of the morning,
Gibbous, waning, raising white skirts hip high.

What is the meaning of all this? What is
All this fuss about meaning? It's nothing
If I don't expect anyone to take

The time, to waste their time, or to buy time
From me, hanging from crossroads in blue air.

Waiting for Moonrise Over the Watchman

By dawn the algorithms will have given
Their automatic birthday greetings
And your inbox will overflow. You can't

Measure time more directly because
Measurement itself is time, every act
Of measuring being an extension of time.

The undersides of the clouds above
The black cliffs that surround you
Glow and fade as they pass over the invisible

Moon while you wait, alone in your courtyard
Until, finally, a gimlet eye, stabbing white,
Fixes you from the mountaintop, a spear

Of reflection, a single point worth watching
Because the sheer edge of the mountain allows
Your slow eyes to see the motion of the full moonrise.

Hollische Schlange, wird dir nicht bange?

"The cars marked BV + MS are still out there."

I like to think I've seen one

Or two, stalled in the Utah

Desert under the Book Cliffs.

I certainly saw rail cars,

Explosively colorful

Against the sandstone, tagged

With garish graffiti, parked

Against the next end of time. 

Five thousand misunderstood

Trips around this small fat star,

Someone tried to explain us

To the gods, explain the gods

To us, why there were serpents

Thunder had to destroy.

Carry On

Angor animi, and I am certain

I am as close to the end of the world

As anyone contemplating rifles

With fixed bayonets charging one's trenches.

Not that I expect I will understand,

Once the actual moment is at hand,

How all momentum shifts in its narrow

Cot like a dreamer, unaware it ends

Continually, meaning it never was,

Not ever, nor anything else, either.

We are never so clever as we thought

We should be when everything never was.

Our Acts

Are not discrete, do not come
Tied in tidy packages.
Messy grasps that spill over
All the lines drawn in the sand
Rooting into the out of
Your cotton-picking mind world
Are all the blurs you conjure.

The cliffs collapse without acts.
The skies repeat their patterns
Of deceptions without acts,
Slightly different every night.
Nothing repeals itself twice.
As if nothing would suffice,
Hours sing songs past parallax.

In the Glaring Sunshine of that Endless Afternoon

Complete with camels and lecherous pop songs cooking

Sous vide under the August Zion crescent moon's flare

That couldn't care less what mischief we were up to then,

As now, a vacuum. Nature abhors nature and makes

More and more of her, like a bronzed, half-drowned mariner 

Dragging weeds and seashells up from the riptide and down

The moonlit, laughing beach. I'm the representative

Of humans being humans, culturing gross nothings.

I will come back here in a hundred years. You will see.

Consider the Aardvark

I know I am human because I am typical

For my species in creating a nest of proud exceptionalism

And then finding myself aggrieved by my loneliness 

Within it. We are primates, after all, first among creatures,

As well as Homo sapiens, last survivor of our genus.

We claim we are unusual, for mammals, in being monospecific,

But what genius but us created genus and gave one to us?

Scanning our planetary taxonomy net, there's rather more

Categories with one species than with any other number,

And yet we are lonely, sighing expressively into our beer

About our uniqueness in our self-conceived, selves-riddled universe.

Have you ever seen an Orycterupus afer,

Monotypic within the family Oryctero podidae,

Monotypic within the order Tubilodentata?

We, you, I alone created this special place for it.

Did you feel exceptionally lonely, seeing it?

Did it look like it thought it might be lonely, too, to you?

Rickety Towers of Surreal Detritus

Geochemistry gives rise seamlessly to biochemistry,
Proving the Unified Theory of Anything: I was, have been,
Immortal as long as I lived; we were, had been, alive.
Gunshots pop from the sound of the local interview,
And the young woman doing the interviewing only
Shrieks a few times in surprise, falls, and cries
Out "Oh my God! Oh my God!" Then she's dead,
Never to cry in sudden realization something terrible
Has happened, oh my god, again.

                                                          Electrons looking
For a place to rest. Nothing more. More nothing. More less.

Supplies

Even if you have life's maintenance machine
Well-oiled, even if you're just the mechanic
To keep it running, you need supplies, friend,
And you need to be able to reel them in.

If you can't, that's the end. You're the rest
Of what you couldn't, yourself, collect, fuel
For something else's little, hungry misery.
The bugs who need fodder crawl over your skin.

But it's a three-part argument to your mind,
Raised on flesh and human deities. Resurrect
Your wish to continue just at the last nonexistent
Moment and recollect your reflective mysteries.

Invention

Sequence is an aspect of the world. First, early organisms converted entropic decay into climbing lives. Much, much later organisms scavenged waste oxygen to fuel multicellular complexities. Plants and fungi elaborated chemicals into pharmacopoeia of weapons and defenses. Some things turned minerals into jaws and teeth. Some things turned minerals into teeth-deflecting armor. Some things piled all that bone into architectures capable of scrambling across continents, capable of flight. Clever crows and apes turned sticks and stones into disposable technology. Linguistic apes broke down sequence into fragments regurgitated as portable narratives. Sequence is an aspect of the world; stories are of humans only.

We're Missing Orphans and Outcasts of All-Swallowing Heaven

A general feature, ridiculous and mysterious,

A prediction that is not a prediction, something went wrong.

It is my intention to astonish you all, although none

Is likely to be impressed any time before I am gone.

Everyone deals with pity. Empathy fears being pitied.

During last year's war, our memories sifted through the rubble.

An observation tower sat on the village perimeter,

And we tried to remember to keep everything in past tense.

Ally the human ability to think narratively

With human capacities for boredom. Inevitably,

Increasingly elaborate clocks were invented to smash

With increasingly elaborate time-delay explosives.

Tempus redux. The knotted arrow flew in all directions

But the eye could only sight along the line uncoiling

And see there's something missing. There's everything and there's nothing,

But even with everything and nothing there's something missing. Dark

Is the metaphor handiest to a vision-addled ape.

Dark is what we notice, what we do, inwardly, outwardly.

In central New Jersey's potato fields, the dragon's black tongue,

Barbed, licked us lightly, like babies, arrowing from toxotes.

Spiritless Spirit Being

Bekenstein's bound has been
Leapt, and the remaining
Shape of Yahweh's event

Horizon has wavered
And released a little
Signature entropy.

He's in there, outta here.
Pine Mountain Bluegrass Band
Warms up in the mirage

Curling up from the mist
Outside Zion Canyon.
Disorder is just lost

Information; the cause
Was heart attack. Hawking
Thought he was wrong. I thought

No one but me could be
So right, no matter who
Me just happened to be.

My Diddley Bow

My jitterbug, my monochord zither,
What sobs can I draw out of you today?

Everything that happened, stays unhappened.
The only philosophy that can work

Moans in its chains and grooves like the sea
Moments before the tsunami comes back.

Take Elmore James over Elmore Leonard.
Taking sliding groans over mysteries.

Surprise Is the Nature of the Universe

'"People need to be able to waste time, make time, lose time and buy time. This will be our major task."'

"The only real thing in his life was his dreams."

The transparently slow moon
Climbs, apparently. The deep,
Indeed, the no-such-thing-as,

Truth itself, climbs from the depths
Of the dry, abandoned well,
Long black hair glossy with wet,

And cries like a cicada
From impossible delight,
Discovering everything

At risk must be surrendered
Just as the long years buried
Give way to blinding-bright night.

I have expended my life
On life's continuity
Only to break clear of it,

My alien, imported,
All-important, borrowed self,
My curved moon honed like a knife.