Circe

I

A careless red dog closed

the distance between us

like the Easter in Faust

his eyes were feathers.

I let him come,

his scrofulous ears

printed neatly upward,

his bones coral thin,

until he lay and talked.

Said you were across

the valley, sealed, lonely,

capable of hatred now.

Wd I follow him there?

u

Arriving, you

shuffled out dreamily

close with beasts.

Hung like them.

I touched my ring.

It promised, at once,

so that I risked.

That harm seemed gone.

Under rocks, Lorrain's

setting made for yr hair,

you opened topics

like ripe fruit.

On all sides

friendly animals

nuzzled me like a chance

to confirm their soft eyes.

In a while we remembered

the one thing that had broken us

from each other like a blade.

I swallowed it and tried to look lonely.

m

In the late afternoon

you made some tea

out of antelope horns.

I touched my ring.

From there I walked.

A kind of pmz

it was, then, flogged

with craters, scrub

pines. I didn't know.

What had we left?

What had left us?

It was nearly eight.

In an hour a moon wd rise.

It wd entangle

itself in the corners of my body

it wd trip and fall.

Cd I pick it up?

There were also squirrels.

They were running too.

And there was a man

with a gun the size

of a toothpick. He passed,

shrinking into an owl's

ear. I hurried.

Really the wood between

us was maddening.

My bones rattled

in their caned going.

PREDERIC WILL

vv

I went back to you later,

(it seemed more familiar),

and grew sleepy. You brought

nursing cubs to show,

trains of wee colts,

sidelong glances. The night

wandered in and out

of itself. The fire went down.

Did you bring me, seeing,

a fire I cd never?

Or stir the ash womb

Thad born in you once?

I flattened myself

suddenly on a bank of red

mosses and went to sleep.

The silence was endless.

It must have been then I

dropped. I became my body.

I entered my body like a

hand. It wd not come out.

v

In the morning you'd gone.

I woke like a stone,

dry inside, veined, stiff,

sniffing its hill. Pieces

of the known passed.

A flower came up

quietly beside me

then broke down in tears.

A bird bothered me

with a call nearly human.

Snails crossed me

with their vast caravans

in search. I opened

slightly each time.

But wanted to close

over the impressions.

When you came

back I cd only half

feel the earth's nerve

warble. And cd answer

only this, wanded.

My tongue frozen

into dry crystal sounds,

thin phonemes, mica.