Dance of shade needs the light source, however dim or back lit.
Illumined from below, still, the dark world absorbs its cosmic quotient and turns.
Timid is the eye before the light, always moving on, not quite arriving at the thing to see.

A photo taken, we pile in the car with our stuff and go away.
We go away.
We leave barely a trace, crinkled paper blown in the road.

Finally with some free time at the end of the road where the forest for a ways has no path,
the dense green of underbrush a bit impenetrable and so left for most, alone.
With the thought of its mounds, root ground and hastenings,
day and night in the same place growing, the same wash pulling at the colors
leaving like tea stains, the mud and sticks and snow slightly merged or separate
as a tangle having no need to be undone and so continuing.

My own self has its mound of hair, full belly and counter parts,
its inflection of shoulder and contemplation.
The afternoon getting away.

The dead easily at bay.
The shade dances as the tree moves,
as sad wonder of gone twilight stutters with disturbances darker,
reflective as of a mist, as of a way to say verisimilitude, accent, copy.

Tan sides of tents flap with a breeze and lump the walls of the space they enclose with a zipper and a screen window, a square ocular frame for what passes here for what it may have been like before, for others plying their time as a sail or an oar, a job for taking your days away and leaving us at evening with almost nothing to say, almost in the quiet.

In the séance of mumbles trying to reach the dead by rubbing sticks together and being barefoot in powdery dust or mud. Feel it between your toes, the itch, the crimson or rust as being cut by the earth and feeling for the tincture stain, for buff pots or dunny glazes,
rapiers of red sliced cheeks.

Gorgonzola, oatmeal, flat worm, delicate as spine ribs articulated thin as fish bones.
Throat catches, finches, black birds,
a whorl of snow on the sky or a knotty log, punked by brine,
thumb tacked to the lab wall, dried, sliced, stained, observed microscopically.

To the end of finding,
to the start of emptying our sand pail with sea water granularity,
of walls at the beach washing away with our cold feel,
our lacquer of preservation as the old stain, the wood frame and the hanging tree.

The ovum and the omnivore, the wood gnarl and the hole with suckling and savage sounds of the water rushing the cataract as an army falls to its stakes and grub, its laundry and preparations, like the shaving kit with its leather place for things and the soapy face and the teen-ager with gray milk water in his veins and daisies by his toes, his pin up lover now trampled at the side, seen by everyone, had like a quick meal, forgotten,
loaded back up in his neat kit sack before killing wracks the plains with the feathers of a lone song stuck in his neck like the bayonet or the branches of the Juniper tree soft as a funeral byre.

Wordsworth would have made the tally. Washington giving back his white cold, wet soldiers, their mothers like the fishing people, all with knots in thread and nets by the sea constantly mending with its waves as the sutures of a sadness, the never comes clan, the hollow of a man left in between.

Between woman and hole, slave and devotee, she brought three fine boys and this leverage turned the tide of the war like a general or a steep hill of advantage.

We sat noon time in a ploughed field at start of Summer with weed heads and flower tops everywhere claiming the margins and the water we worried about collecting.
Hold some ground in your hand.
And a handful of seed and some rice, some flour and an egg.

Buy low, sell high
we all are a little ill prepared to die.
Cake, biscuits, hard tack and blubber as the sea would have for human stay, for woman to raise her baby or for work to finally be done.
All can lay down in the furrows and cry.
We can all forever say bye and good bye. Coal for eyes.

Whale ribs white on the beach like two by four studs going up in suburban walls.
The cars are blood.
The steam is grass of the train engine belching, the back fire like a gun sound and all of the people lie down.

All of the people asleep.
All of the dreams in red and blue with cake and streamers of the sky.
Clouds, planes, bombs.

Stuck at the Great War are we?
Splinters from a dry noose in your tender palm skin.
Asking again, how and why and who survived?
No one survived.
Mothers laid down at night like the rest.

Trench, moat, dream of a siren and the morphine and finally the red that fills the eyes taking us all away. Taking us easily away like the end days of long famine.

Great barrels of grease on the port boards above the shore. The water sloshes below.
Gravity and liquid are cousins with the moon and young mothers feeling their bellies with both hands, rubbing the womb with the tomb dream of boys gone under
as the sinking suck of sea and white water covers their heads with a great moving weight, the suffocating water in columns and fathoms counting out its silent and restless depth.

The old locker, empty as teeth, the fish and the sand wheeling, making dark where the bright once stood, making mud where the dry land gives way and plops in the current from the flood bank shore.

No boat can save the baby mother, her deliverance is due, her molten equanimity is disturbed as by the pull of bad weather and far to go.