The dark one,
Receiver of all songs,
Fetch of all longing,
Herself lonely as the break of dishes
Fallen from her maiden’s cabinet
With no one home but the cats and
The kiss of wind on the rusty nails.

What does it mean
To have to abandon one’s home in the dark
To stand living and sweet
In the full solitude of an open plain,
No claim but to the selves whose eyes turn in the leaves,
The broken gates where heads bob,
Where the Jack-o-lantern rots from the inside, its warning
Like the grass on temporality.
Like man on his song of love for the drifting current,
His holding out for the same cloud to pass again
Its cool shadow on his head.

To lift up like stalks of corn, the woman as Goddess Demeter,
As the wheat and anchovy of sea and land
That feeds the eager ear and her cousin the mind
Making worlds of the disparate neurons,
The pulsing blood, the defending lymph and the sun.

Bright calling is the corn goddess and her shadow world of moons
That calve and wane, that wax in the corpuscles,
Fake their way at the market stalls
To place the kopek in the pocket of her light, torn dress
Going home over the broken roads of unrelieving lust.

The burden of the countrymen at copse and crossroad,
Measuring out the stone, weighing in the measure of the field,
Her woman’s lap in evening light hushed as Elysium,
Locked as asylum with the worn memory of her coin and crop,
The dangling heads on pikes to water dry ditches
With poignant forgetting
Over and Over
Until we get at some ill feeling of foreboding
On a perfectly beautiful morning,
On the waking of her supple breast
As she is on her back, flattened slightly,
The nipple nodding to her innocent breath.

The odes bathe the way
Two by two like the Ox and Tigers loading on to the ark.
It comes to this passing,
This cross road, this imitation of original intent.
So many put furrows in the ground
To tuck seeds in her loin and
Beat the poor girl with her fertile tears
To sprout and tear at the ground
With the nails of parting,
The lid blown open,
The dead seeming to walk among us,
The crowd loud and restless,
The girl at the soul’s window
With her mortal wound and promise,
Her suffering for the gallant mirror
She shines with her eye
Like the farmer squinting
At the rising sun’s rays.