All, One Neck

The earth bares forth its patient throat. The fog
threads tendon after tendon through the bog,
then buttons valleys with a surgeon's thread
that stitches living muscle to the dead.

Pines rake green lice from every passing gale.
The wind complains in resin, bark, and shale.
A river hauls its chain of mirrors slow
through clay that learned a million years ago

the grammar of erosion. Roots recite
their damp scholastic disputatio by night.
Moonlight, waterlogged, acquires the taste
of silver marrow, beautifully waste.

All evening heaven studies how to fall.
Cloud enters cloud. They misremember all
the treaties signed by weather. Stars withdraw,
like plague-house shutters closing without law.

Tomorrow leaks beneath yesterday's skin.
The dawn arrives before the dusk walks in.
Midnight flowers underneath the noon.
The wolves rehearse eclipse against the moon

whose orbit now declines to orbit. Time
misbuttons every hour into rhyme.
Calendars molt. Their paper vertebrae
grow feathers, fly, return as mouldering hay.

Language catches fungal bloom. Each noun
erupts with moss. Verbs trickle upside-down.
Granite conjugates the rainfall's tense.
The commas graze. The vowels climb the fence.

Philologists accuse the rocks of fraud.
The raven answers, impeccably awed,
then pockets every footnote in its beak.
The scholars spend six centuries to speak

the sentence that a salmon understood
while shouldering upstream through stone and wood.
The octopus computes with dreaming ink.
The jackdaw edits thought before we think.

What theorem blooms inside the spider's snare?
What grammar nests beneath the polar bear?
Who proved the tongue distinguished ape from saint
when wolves decline abstraction without faint?

Arithmetic perfumes the honeycomb.
The whale's deep calculus outlives the tome.
Slime mould elects the shortest road through rain
while senators debate the word terrain.

I keep a zoology beneath my ribs.
Hatreds hatch with translucent eyelids, gills,
compound ocelli polishing the gloom,
each memory another fertile womb.

They breed by fission in a glassless dish
where every wound invents another wish.
One hatred suckles numbers from a bone.
One flowers cartilage instead of stone.

One smiles through orthodontics made of frost.
One counts each tenderness already lost.
One molts into a parliament of flies
that legislate through thousand-faceted eyes.

Linnaeus coughs. Darwin rearranges dust.
Bataille baptizes appetite with rust.
Cioran oils despair till every seam
reflects the architecture of a dream.

Weil stoops to gather gravity like wheat.
Girard hears hoofbeats echo every street.
Plotinus finds the root beneath the root.
Eckhart plants silence in forbidden fruit.

Heraclitus laughs rivers into flame.
Kristeva salts the abattoir of name.
Agamben maps the threshold of the throat.
Taubes folds doomsday into every note.

Their pages mildew gently in the rain.
Earthworms annotate each mouldering vein.
The archives sweeten into fungal loam.
The footnotes find my marrow more than home.

A beautiful circulation. Rot
becomes another commentary wrought
by mouths without a language, yet they know
what all our lexicons forget to grow.

Each notification blooms like mold.
Its gospel's measured hourly, bought and sold.
The glowing screen absolves us with a swipe.
Desire matures before the fruit is ripe.

The market genuflects before its chart.
Algorithms cultivate the heart.
Each heartbeat enters metrics, graphs, and shares.
The soul accepts cookies with vacant prayers.

Augustine refreshes every page.
Debord scrolls onward through the mirrored cage.
Ellul watches machinery take root.
Weber trims ascetic branches into fruit.

Some cherub audits carbon in the rain.
A seraph balances actuarial pain.
An angel scans biometrics at the gate.
A demon moderates the town hall's hate.

Caesar posts tomorrow's afternoon.
Hildegard uploads another moon.
Plotinus dreams a neural labyrinth
whose neurons chant in Attic labyrinth.

Babel babbles beautifully askew.
Animal births anima anew.
Logos fractures into lo, go, then leaves
its golden husk among the autumn sheaves.

Earth whispers humus. Homo answers hume.
The vowels flower. Consonants exhume
forgotten beasts whose alphabetic hides
shed punctuation where the darkness glides.

Acts of excess blossom into glass.
Cathedrals germinate in molten brass.
A tyrant suckles orchids made of wire.
Stock exchanges photosynthesize fire.

The oceans chew through continents of foam.
Plastic pollinates the whale's blue home.
The satellites bloom lichens in the sky.
Advertisements teach the saints to buy.

How scholarly the massacre appears.
Each theorem irrigated by our fears.
Each white paper perfumed with powdered bone.
Each empire harvesting a seed alone.

Yet foxglove rings its poisonous delight.
Mushrooms illuminate the buried night.
A cedar meditates in fragrant sleep.
The trilobites remember in the deep.

I dream my palms upon mundi's great vein,
where granite pulses underneath the rain.
The arteries of basalt softly drum.
Whole oceans gather where the fingers numb.

I feel extinct anatomies return.
Old feathers smoulder where no feathers burn.
The mammoth's breath condenses in my lung.
Future birds rehearse an unborn tongue.

The pulse invades my pulse until each beat
confuses blood with continental heat.
Identity commits a sweet solecism.
Bone acquires botanical baptism.

The earth inclines.

Its throat remains unveiled.

History flowers where the flesh has failed.
Every beast, theologian, king, machine,
every cryptid lurking in the green,

every saint whose halo rotted through,
every market making gods from blue,
every child asleep beneath the loam,
every exile searching still for home,

enters one impossible refrain
whose every rhyme resembles growth and pain,
whose every slant rhyme wounds because it heals,
whose cadence thinks, whose metaphor conceals

a mouth beneath the mountain's breathing hide.

I hear it.

Then I answer.

Then divide.