i.
Running through the forest whipping
the hawks before him, his last handsome
days engaged his risen hands at last. Before
all else they flew, no longer thumbing stones
or flinging shells of cloven shapes, but limbs
and sky, chasing crashed blacknesses deeper
than hides once stretched across trails, hung
between doorways of sleep and buoyancy.
The fatigues of his spirit unhindered, his steps,
if they could be called such, channeled ancients
of immediacy. For what is there to be learned
from the snakes in one’s path? Even leapt
they are lifeless, eyes deadened white, coiled
in cruelty’s compact. Better to fly best one can
across lands immune to fleshy divides. Cast them
aside and trace the flares between tree and night’s
Other—flog their wings with whips hand-flayed
from old grief cats found walking in the rain.
ii.
Fast moving, galloping fierce under trees’
ghost-like make of hot-breath abundance,
his hands now touched the trembling canvas-
colors sprayed like a thousand thousand mice
flying through the air. As he shook, the valleys
laughed and presented pictures of solitude open
to the staring slip-slip eyes. Slaying amongst
themselves that which was, the battle begat. Life—
eternally fixed above him—could not be recovered,
though he walked upon the back of the wide fish
in the dark silence, in the heat, knowing to do so
was essential, for behind him his darkest features
smiled as he, the perfect metal, no longer captive
of the sacrificial tissues and griefs of this artificial
horse-hoof gallop, strode the dark wood down.
iii.
Juggling blood and fire beneath the stars of Egypt,
scarred with deep clickings like fox feet on glass,
there wasn’t a moon, that emergent Earth Child
on which God’s Occasional Fist compounds our salts,
allowed to intervene. It’s good to have wounds upon
one’s eyes within a mercury’d mirror—to see the slip
of the hand that feeds into the hand that kills to finish
this crime conceived in a world suspended between feet
and sky, for even bad eyes can see the dying leaves—
especially bad eyes—can see their mindless forms
flowing. Anything raced is more nimble! he roared
as autumn’s black ganglions spread against grey
and sped on into the night.
b
