Consider the road, long and forked as the Devil’s own tongue. Consider the Devil, burning every bridge; Placing in every tree a black bird. In every bird a black thought.
Consider my Lover; the yellow church of his skin, the clean wells of his ears; How the notes of a song come to him like birds descending on a power line; How in his absence I am of two throats--each of them cramped.
I know my breasts, small as plums, would win no blue ribbons. But in your hands they tremble and fill with song like plump, white birds.
Darkness moves like a pack of wild dogs. The wind moves like a wounded animal. The ground must be full of teeth by now.
If Springtime crawls out of the wild mouths of flowers, then surely, Winter crawls out of mine.
Winter is already a lost shape, forgotten in the ground. Instead, here is Spring with all the grace of a woman smoothing out her apron.
Consider, O Lover, my throat white as cigarette paper. The crushed lavender of my knuckles. My heart, a dulled needle threaded through too many patterns.
There are bones waiting for names in the graveyards. Even the sun above us is dying, one landed repetition of light at a time.
If the sun rolled back like an eye, it would see the mind of God.
That dandy, the sky, enters blue-suited sun like a scotch in hand.
Consider, O Lord, how You sit atop the sky; like a man in a glass bottom boat. Consider sky elsewhere; worn thin as a mattress.
Prayer is a many fingered and kaleidoscopic thing—it folds and unfolds inside of you. It enters the many rooms you cannot enter.
