Entropy, Goddess of the Hunt

A hammered silver bracelet, sliding down
the river's arm: the early evening sun
precisely tracks the bus. The day is gone

down tunnels of obscure, repeated tasks
and sparkless contact, toward impending dusk,
down grooves worn smooth of feature, bump or risk.

Excreted days accumulate like sand
in hourglasses, to no measured end.
The hollow goddess of this circumstance

demands no sacrifice in flame or blood.
The empty altar bears sufficient deed
of homage: no more than we could.

Her boneless body, in our image caught,
sprawls beside the water, stretches out,
a sacrificial gesture before night.


the flavour of tomorrow

Wondering, since the first other fell,
stone-eyed and still, then gradually
oozed into the nourishing dirt:
is death the everywhere leaf-sprawl
brown upon the browning grass,
or bud-spurt, moist and greeny?
No way to tell, but knowing
in the soul's tangled rootball
that something or nothing
flowers otherside always.
Certainty would kill,
and leave the breath
bereft of hope by certainty,
or make the rest of days
like pebbles in a shadowed bowl:
drawing, drawing, 'til that one comes
into the breaking-glass light.
Either way would lose.
What might or might not be
is sweet on the tongue.

a ship in a bottle

Shapes, edges, curves -
what light wraps.
Patterns of separation
like the map of a land
nobody lives in.

Lines, curves, ruffles -
a skin of two beasts
like a sex act -
the rock begins
where the wind ends:
one edge.

A ship in a bottle
like a note to a ship in a bottle.
Help.
I'm an island.

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