Sunday, September 23, 2012

Evensong

Find me in the evening

—where the dogwood erupts
by the tin roof shed
—wordless mostly,
our fingers latticing, unlatticing,
dirtward eyes —then
whisper-burst of ruddy warmth
—thunder foaming up
from a dusky belly of sky—
silver tendon threading our lips, then
snap! —and laughter
ringing down the night’s long throat
—I in sudden dereliction,
in breathless serein baptism,
vortexed under milky bracts
—sphinx moth, solemn witness
marks the passing

Find me in the evening

—in the garden floor
where the hornworms pray,
cherry tomatoes in our hair
—soft alien geometry and
chimeras of breath and tears
immolating everything
—hosannas like bottle rockets
tunneling black air
as tumbled loam accepts the blood,
—our wreck of desperate flesh
silvered
on this secret tongue of earth,
salt-rheum in greedy teeth,
—the world a turgid oath
killed and birthed a thousand times
in the anthem of the katydid

Find me in the evening

—in the deltaed ebb
of a spilt cocktail sunfall,
past the barn owl's haunted versicle
—you, delivered up
with the moon, minnow-swift
in the stone circuitries of this otherworld
—I, oafish in the permalight
of street- and carlamps,
easing into the drink easing into me
—first lash of lightning calls your laughter back
and we are stormed
—stutter-stumbling through buzzing neon Calvary,
my lips in the rain in your hair,
begging your blood into dance—
to the barn owl and to us, somewhere,
the argiope responds

Find me in the evening

—where the buckled sky bruises
in a coma-gasp of fog,
in the garden floor where
the tall years
topple me
—you, quick tempest
of hands and flooded cheeks and words,
creasing me into your waking terror
—night, its claws in my eyes,
yawning like a fallow field—
—I, leaking breath and memory,
find again that thunder-stolen laugh, stagger after,
crawl—
cicadas swell a silver hymn into the gloam
—the wind, from the dogwood,
pulls a canticle of leaves

Find me in the evening

—when the noise-thick sun
sloughs its final blister in the hills,
—when the day drags its ochred belly
to a tear-drunk sleep
and the prayers lie silent with the plowshares,
—I, in gathered moments, unfurl to you
with the dogwood,
am sung to you in the storm’s slow psalm
where the horizon blushed with us
by the tin roof shed—
my lips in the rain in your hair
—drink me
from the argent censer of the moon,
reclaim me from the sphinx moth’s
searchless stare—
O, do not hunt me in the golden maw of heaven—

Find me in the evening

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