All, One Neck

The earth bares its neck.
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 fatal collapse.
Cloud after cloud
slide 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 memory's warm petri dish.

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,
and then... tightening.