frail lily
The dense trees smeared deep within their loam,
the wind breaking over me as foliage rustled quietly,
as the path narrowed into the hollow, crystalline.
Ahead, a great red body turning on the horizon,
and the greenhouse bowed low through the air.
The walls slid slick with spit and sweating damp,
a monkish armpit sweetening these stones.
Worts swelled infectious on the dirt-path sides,
and a teen-old calf skull lay agape upon the road.
There was one place left to go: the waters turning.
Grass dragged around my feet while thickets split
wide toward the bright sea, blinding in its light,
the lives of Sodoms unreeling in the water like stars,
and I stood above the rocky meadow-beach, watching
where he stood groom-like in his sculpted cassock.
His pocketbook lay lacquered thick with blood
among the densely lit and little flowers.
The saints stood mouth-agape, all running red,
their plasma-like oil washing over the nude child
like a blind red sea breaking overhead.
Hands grasping against his side in breathless awe,
each cell in him—virginal to the smoke
rising like an old perfume around them both,
a wretched cry boiling through the incense haze
as my toes slowly sank down into the red.
The sea itself seemed widening from the wound,
a riptide of old resentment, heavy with unction,
gliding crimson over the scene: church candles
like honeymoon flowers on holy bathwater,
rising to the horizon, simmering to my knees.
I felt the tightening wires stretched between us,
a culture with pegs too deep to tear free,
its soul wound shut around me like a snare.
It closed around my feet and bent me down
toward the churchward ocean of the dead.
pliant vault
forest coyote
