All, One Neck

The earth wears its neck openly.

Fog fingers the tendons of valleys.
Pines comb green lice from the wind.
A river drags its chain of mirrors
through clay and root and drowned moonlight.

All evening
the sky practices collapse.

Cloud after cloud
slides across the stars
like shutters across a plague house.

I carry a zoology of hatreds.

Hatred with compound eyes.
Hatred with gills.
Hatred that breeds by fission
in the warm petri dish of memory.

Every hour feeds it.

The fields have heard sermons enough.
Rain has translated them into mud.
The worms consume the archives.
The archives enrich the worms.

A beautiful circulation.

I dream of placing both hands
upon mundi's pulse,
feeling the great arterial surf
hammering beneath granite and ocean,
then tightening.

Mountain by mountain.

Until the clocks burst seeds of silence.

The moon hangs there,
a chipped coin
from some bankrupt heaven.

Around it,
constellations scatter their algebra.
Dead suns arrive centuries late,
panting,
dust-coated,
bearing obsolete decrees.

Meanwhile,
the heart manufactures fresh catastrophes.

Night gathers its instruments.

Cold enters the blood
with the delicacy of a scholar
turning pages.

Above,
the heavens glitter
with forensic enthusiasm.

Below,
the dark keeps growing,
cell by cell,
empire by empire,
thought by thought.

And somewhere within that expansion
rage flowers.

Vast.

Red.

Many-petalled.

Its roots drink from every century.

Its bloom faces eternity
and opens wider.