Poetry
Isn’t the eagle a little
unnecessary?
I mean,
Maui did it too,
and no one gnaws
his liver.
You know as well as I do
that my gift is more a curse
than anything.
So I gave them fire.
Yes, they can bake bread,
and that offends your
sensibilities,
but they’ll burn their daughters
too,
and soon, their smoking world
will smother them.
Egyptian Rem: “to weep;”
Fish god, Nile god
I could gut you.
Cast your chalk spine
Into the reeds,
Barbed hook through your eye
To lure shachihoko from
The shores of gold Nihon.
Yes, your tears
Feed cotton on the Nile,
But shachihoko’s tiger howl
Stings the sky itself to weeping,
And what could depose
The ecstasy of ablution?
I would bathe with tears
plucked from the face of God.
She lies against the curve of the sea’s hip,
clothed only in sand.
and never before have I envied
crushed quartz,
but I envy the dust that supports her.
When the tide thieves it away,
I shall drink one of those graced grains.
I’ll pack that sedimentary sentiment
into my shell.
I’ll study it well,
though it burns my tongue.
One day,
a suitor with a shallow knife
will cut her from me,
just to admire her beauty.
Were I he,
I would do the same.
You spread dry monsters on the pale flowers:
cracked tentacles, calcified fangs, horns
and hides and pelts of hounds of hell and
Artemisian golden hinds, lined up beside
blinded cooling cyclops;
Viper-tressed gorgons beheaded
and bagged, Scylla’s necks dragged out
of her crags and splayed against sprays
of heather and thyme, junebugs lapping
the sea-salt slime still damp on her teeth.
Herculean thief, even wildflower dusk
won’t mourn the husks you’ve laid out
against sprays of heather and thyme.