When I was bright and eaten by
the poppies’-stain and given
to the brighter arts,
I fancied for myself a hallowed myth
that ate away at childhood’s sad lament
and ‘memebered at that there within was hidden
in the answer’s rudish hollow.
Still, back behind the water’s pooling,
I ate away at my content,
misplaced and dying to erase away
the hours lived at tide’s-wash, turning,
at my mother’s churlish breasts.
And as I rooted deep
in mediation,
shadows grew and shadow’d figures on the wall
became my distant, grudging host and legion,
eating at my hearts desire.
The curse that ate the later coming body
came the same as that which ate at
Lazarus’ flesh, and at the tomb’s gate swallowed up
the child that rested in the mother’s softening womb.
When these eyes bright-flashed at omens,
simple and unbending, telling of a passing life,
the child in ceremony sang
and bowed before the movement of the tepid knife.
Up in the hills
(precluding mounds of death and mountain),
parching for the swallowed crest,
the whorish sang of sex and Babylon,
and songs that sang of tasted lust passed by, in pace,
and carried on, so that the pious
gave me meaning,
there I lingered on.
And as the sage’s rustlling tampered,
beaten by the snow’s-bed falling,
the window filled became the saddened calling
for the green to go about its dying
and to fall about our paths.
one night as the hours caved in
One night as the hours caved in,
cracking like a length of ribbon, shorn,
and smiling ribs and sepulcral fingers,
as they broke,
Time got up, she stopped and left the room
and left to go, and entered soon,
with running feet that, mad with passage
shared the future’s running.
The women in the garden who,
among the crackling ribbon flowers,
and with much consternation, screeched
the lamentation towards the fleeting of
the day
as she ran wide;
Death rattles and ululations followed suit,
clothing themselves like deGama
in Florida,
and swamped in heavy armor’s glistening,
she went to her drowning.
robert cole-sackett