Intent on Song

Toltec sand and the rustle of leaves by the cenotes,
Deep tunneling clear water through the lava tubes,
The limestones of skeletal microbes compressed,
Dripping algae in the cave, such is the dream of insides,

The cool in the heat of the day,
The places once fired and cooked by the belly of the earth,
Now conceived and reconceived by the people
Gathering up straw or shake or leaves for plates and shelters.

Habitation a thousand years on,
A thousand years on, the flat lands rumble with volcanos.
Inca eyes of turquoise crystalize, stones cut just so,
Shine of the dragon shrine, the cave of the numinous feathered serpent.

Luminescent darting fish down the gullet of selves
Which serve as world to the imagination of conquerors and slaves.
The thin slick slime on the pail bottom,
The uterus of the dried fire, the fibroid of thatch and grass
As the pang of movement shifting North and South,
The whole continent of birth and generation and fire.

Red as ants in an Army on the march capturing juice of captives,
White, helpless and rich as slugs, caterpillars and
Wayward flies on the rim of a briny lake.
Fire god, flower god – butterfly.

Sempiternal shake of the wing that blows as a kiss up the forested hillside
To the top rocks where the view is one of endless jungle,
Before man, before woman the feast of sunning moisture and low fog
With horizon promises of heavy rain in the clouds.

An aeon of rain wearing the land flat
With braided streams,
With humps of blocked ponds and
Seeps deeper than any mind’s eye.

Click of landslides, drought, fire, abundant time,
Season after season laying on its toads and monkeys,
Its racing vines among seedlings grown to tower and
Falling back again, wet and dark as earth circled by her
Bats and bugs and fantasy of how land came from water,
Water from the sky,
Sky from the meeting of separated twins,
Squabbling over scraps,
Coming down as falling walls in an earthquake of dust but
Writ large for the very sky to burst,
The stars to pour forth as water to a cave
Known as no edge, no middle, no wall and no kingdom
As in the time of sleep all space travels her iridescent path
Of the deep obliviated in avowal of allowing too much to pass
Without rigor or decision,
Too much allowed too long to be formless
On the top of formless back of turtles
With turtle worlds on the backs of turtles all the way down
Ad infinitum.

The dust of regression catches in the gills,
The spreading middle of the sea
Upon warm sands spreading
Wave after wave of advance and retreat, retreat and advance.

Tulip face,
Lover from behind, red as raspberries,
Ruby nipples, pearly skin washed and washed again
Like the shore keeping track in the abacus of if its sands.

In the necklace of skulls the fearsome Goddess gloats,
In the drip of red lips and
Jaguar with blood jowl whiskers
Belly hungry as her babies,
Pink and vulnerable in the straw.

The build up takes another ten million years and by then
Everything seems changed.
We are left at the beach with a hole where souls should be.
A perfect fit for the wind that carries sand grain by grain,
Down the neck of the hourglass to the pillow of turning over,
Wet as Spring, agile as the cat tensed
And the birds intent on song.