Therein lies the fur, filled with running wind,
Milkweed in the scruff, the scent of wild-wood,
Some mystery-hearted forest where pulse begins.
Therein lies the Centaur, satyr, and god-disguised swan,
Ageless wonders prowled upon by an age-old Parthenon.
You broke your wolf’s tooth through those haunches of lore.

Therein lies the fur, filled with barking dust and dandelion war,
With a spine that stretched back to the she-wolf and city-birth,
The peeled nerve of a howl once tremored your Aurelian lips.
Therein lies the serf, hunter, fairer hand, and lord,
From wattles and daub, the wandering-sands of Saracen, or Crusader’s moor.
You kept the path beside to remind that instinct shines as the holiest earth.

Therein lies the fur, the warm, ungovernable peasant of sleep,
Ever prophetic in your skies by eyeshut-trace of the hunting moon,
Twitching at the day’s thousand faces, all asleep in themselves.
Therein lies the soldier, nurse, chaplain, and fell-prayer,
Mange-like war is the whimpering season with its flea-bitten welts of stars.
You struck blind but true at the throat of gas-hissing war.

Therein lies the fur, outracing the rain and the spout,
Nested with more birds and Autumn song than rain,
Your sleeping ear pooled like cool eaves of the barn.

I sing once more like a boy into your unfolded ear.
Listen always for my ancient, choral voice and your chores of play,
And race earback to the sun in the belly-grass of your free-eyed fields.
Leave your last paw mark, torn on the red clay of my hand.
You are forever wrapped in human touch, ageless and aged,
And if ever the dark in madder darkness encroaches,
Leave black eternity to my faithful eyes.

Come home from eagle-throated distance,
The canoe-tip of the crescent moon scuds
Into the silted, mud-bed of heaven.
Her face-dream beside the pine trees
The mollusc of purpled wampum beads shining.  

Bury my hands, ninidji, in the eagle’s nest,
Carry my feeling words to her on wings.
Let her mix roots, berries, clay
and the feather of my hands
To paint her face with my words and these trees.

Or let my hands ripple like flat-fish
Above the silt-bed of her slim stomach,
Held there in radiant scaled warmth.
Lappihanne, the rapid water of our river heart,
Like an arrow that glides from the bow,
My people where the tide ebbs and flows.

To us both, the dark, golden edge of woods whispers, kuwumaras…
And the water arrow will never land,
But carried in my eagle’s hands,
I say kuwumaras, my love, and pierce through all darkness
To the empty path made full with the ripples of all who have passed.
My nika, swan of the woods, let us dive into the dark, golden sea
Of forever in the hills.

If the sun was dipped in ice for a moment,
It would not burn, but sing of the difference of self,
The disparate extreme, the broken yelp of a solar flare,
Muted by the soothing sojourn of iced light in layers.

Cover love in ice and it burns,
Voluptuous in its piercings,
In shocking bloom through the universe.

Death has pluck, you know, the like to sever love,
Then to show unannounced after the ruckus,
Even after so many no-shows at the theatre or club.
Death, indeed, is a tough sport, I am told,
Who plays cricket or some the sort,
Though no one really knows or asks,
“Wicket” does seem a word of choice.
But, for certain, a devil’s ouija hand
Of bridge whist, as sure as lives off
Pall Mall or Regent, as pipes a walk
In the London fog, here and there.
Yes, indeed, I would call him a chum
If he wasn’t such a cad.

Time has turned her back on me,
So I feel the rough shoulder blades of sin,
So I no longer conjugate with her reflective eyes,
But see the incommunicable universe, as cosmos
Of ribs and unshining lungs, wet and clay-like,
With fingerprints where I pressed in.

Time has a ravaged back and the organs drop
Like sodden fruit, gone unpicked.
Time is that woman looking back,
With her hair witchery of forever turning.
I see the future lovers on her crystal path,
Translucent workings of her single-sided glass.

Love has passed me by like a stream at a miller’s side
Who has store of grains and grinds and little else.
A bird is the mill wheel that spills out
Small buckets of splashing trills in these woods
~Whose heart is the great spiral tragedy of a tree
that lessens itself by load of leaves~
Love has passed me by like a road for the dusted hoof
Of a pack horse whose rider is a daze of coin-pursed eyes,
And a saddle of dry distance for fortune’s miles.

Love, how you pass me again and again,
In your madness for grain of coin and its too many roles.
Sometimes the giver is more gift than the rose.

She is the typesetter’s “e”

The once-rounded uncial script,
Unbroken like the solemn vow of a monk,
His whisper, a shepherd of words under the cowl,
Murmurations of the Holy Mother to the lambswool shroud of candlelight.

His candle-flock of dreams to some hill of penitent towers, war-cowed
And broken open like faith-unfended helmets, littering the ground,
With their unspeaking tassels in babbling pagan sound of wind,
That hill too, once-rounded bare under the glittering apostles of twilight.

In the abbeywork of air, calligraphy was a cipher of souls,
He unwrested demons from an inkwell of sunsets, smothered them in blotting paper,
Freed the incarnate whole to the book of hours, nib-pointed in quills and illuminated in gold,
Line by line, in Carolingian winding sheets, he returned the misshapen to the fold,
To the carpet page of home and the warm ligatures of their waiting women.
So the shutters of the heavenly house could blow light in slanted rays to a wilderness in storm.

But he never tamed the aero-elongated, descender of Troy in a “t,”
He never knew the unholiness of the underscore or fonts as ******,
Or the world unwilling to know itself in serif robes of ancient lore.
His life was a simple rounded-out syllable of one man,
Left in the muddied, unintelligible text of faith and war.

She is the typesetter’s “e” and now belongs to any hand.