They’re going to Glasgow, they’re going to Inverness and to Skye. They’ll ride over bogs of musk ox and arctic foxes, tracing the scat of polar bears, open-mouthed masses swallowing snatches of blue vacancies, ragged absences filling the empty air, sea birds climbing, vanishing only to emerge in Reykjavík and west, soaring…
He took him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” And He added, “So shall your offspring be.” I have lived in tents and know how faint a trace we leave behind us on the earth; how, when the body fails, the soul folds its…
In the days when a man would hold a swarm of words inside his belly, nestled against his spleen, singing. In the days of nightriders when life tongued a reed till blues & sorrow songs called out of the deep night: Another man done gone. Another man done gone. In the days when one…
I. The garden of Eden. Also called earthly p., to distinguish it from the heavenly p. First She is seventeen, he twenty-one. She is a green girl, Ophelic but believing Herself a witch-queen, while he plays Edmund, Bastard and natural. Sitting on the cliff’s edge, her Back to the village where floats down…
When the poles clatter past, the years fall away, a spider drops from the petals of a flower, space is ever more empty the larger it grows, the steel wheels chunk-chunk-chunk on the joints of the rails, the friction making sparks, stars crushed and invisible to us inside. There is a distance that diminishes as…
In line with many strangers, we were roughed-up bodies ready for more. We clasped hands. A song made us iron. The line of us could walk and sing. The line of us went on and on—up the steps of the capitol and out into towns with quarter-inch phone books. Some in line knew the gods…
We shelter best that which destroys us. Language. Speaking to the other is like this: standing on a small raft; baskets of apples to balance it; a murder of crows downstream. There are no maps of the waters that cross through this house. A shut door does no good. Even pots with lids…
Braced against the worst gusts yet this summer astride the promontory’s highest ridge, breathless we stare out across sea-glare into distance diaphanous as mist. * Wind-whirred grass buzzes our ankles here where temples rise bone-bright through blood worship with a view. The present scatters roughly like whitecaps on a sea-face. * We…
There is not so much water here as pollen. A lesson in obedience, in Victorian industry: I am busy, busy therefore the child will live. Sheets blossoming like crucified roses. I beg the silk of a single petal. Am denied. You will not need this currency for your particular journey. I return to the stove….
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