coda

My mouth is filled with sweetness
as my hands hold to the bruised grasses
- I live on you, in you only,
until I am sent away from the world.

melody

In all this, I learned
the hot taste of disappointment,
of bitterness’s swift and rank growth
and of what fruit it bore.

This was only in your absence.

When I learned to recognize the foot on the step,
all at once my garden tumbled away
as though a great fire cleared away dead, choked growth
and spring put out new leaves, all in a second.
All this time, you waited for my hand to touch yours,
when I’ve been wailing about my loneliness,
both eyes closed against the light
while I lamented darkness.

bitter

i stretch my heart out
on wires,
pegged to the sky
against your return.

you have no need
of banners -
it is only i who flies them.

departure

on and on,
without measure or thought
the wind carries over us
rushing past the curtain
over the glossy flesh of midnight
to the centre of you and I,
there, where a rare flame is lit to praise.

it moves on and on again
but we, locked in the blind core of fire,
pay it no mind, just yet.

at dawn, when
you have taken the first step away
and eternal day outshines the things
that burn on at night
- then we wish for a wind
to carry us on, on.

branch

severed child of a mother
gone even in memory,
dawn-soft and tapered
around the edges -
maps leading nowhere
to any bend of search.

offspring, with the cut
as bright as sun,
as unhealing as the last wound,
i cannot lead you to surcease,
nor offer any brush to blur pain.

you have been gone too long,
where there were rivers,
there are not even roads
to show you had ever known a way.

perhaps in a different dust
you’ll bring a new story to bear
suffering, tear free light.

until that then,
wish me well,
i have gone away.

frost

tapping loose and thin on the roof
of the earth, a gesture into sky -
wasted effort in this season of loss.
better stay brittle-edged, bright as swords
staying upright with the effort borrowed
from the train of the killing blow.

dark-burning heart,
you flicker without illuminating
for my eyes are blinded to look upon you.

from behind me, under me,
above me and within me,
you speak:
you did not know sight
until you lit my flame in your chest,
until my light was the only one to see by.

nokomis

wake, toad-
evil-chewer, moon-swallower
transforming darkness
to ordinary mud.

not for us, the glorious flowering
of shadows into light;
take out the pain and suffering
sin-eater, transmute agony into something plain,
from which flowers grow, and grass also.

goddess

i feel your hair under my hands-
i’ve run my fingers through the dead grass
brushed the grain-waving tangleclusters
at the end of the grey stems.
i feel the leather-tough insect-punctured leafskin
wet and blooming with colour

when i meet you again
in the breathless static darkness
little rain-rolled rocks will gleam at me
as you open all your eyes.

i need to walk the dying road
where the dying things are scattered,
handfuls of gems underfoot-
a corner gilded and flashing bone-bare
in the last weakness of sun.

the thread binds my way, pushes me
from death to death, psychopompos
looking for a way to catalogue each facet
of shining rot, of charming decay
to get it down in the books, and rest in winter.

(then there’s no dying, just dead.)
in this last half, then, I follow the dying things,
let my eyes fill with the motion of living to ash.