~ SYLVAN STORM
or,
‘Birth’

Where the meadow meets the earth, vagrant shades
spark nature’s indigo gasp of the soil-drowned
world that plays at the feet of the woods.
Wind-lashed, blood-red peonies coil their ragged
tongues — tongues that steal joy and mimic laughter.
Peonies dishevel the humus. They sing their
sanguine selves an embellished tune.

To oblivion.

Where the earth meets the sea it molts its moss
towering over rock-bruised bones.
It alone knows the night the divine rolled
its wheels out of nature’s dross.
It alone witnessed the grind of stone
on bone and temple-staked massacres —
a seduction intended to kill.

Where the sea met the storm, it wept
(as seas are inclined to do).
The storm shuddered in its red-buttoned boots —
(it wasn’t the crying kind).
Then Sibyl stepped in.
She was more hazel than
sun or sand.
A cat-eyed fugitive, she took her roots with
her when she wandered.

(“Easier this way,” she’d say.)

Her womb is heavy with her extravagances,
her catkins low and ready to drop.
Sibyl, next to Sophia
(her Gemini complement),
takes decay by the reins.
While Sophia, a lingering ash, dusty and ancient,
weaves knowledge into life, Sibyl’s leaves strain
against their inevitable disarticulation.

Where the storm cracks the earth,
it knows nothing of this until it whitens
the loam into birch and aspen —
a truer Gemini than Sibyl’s hazel to Sophia’s ash.
The birch, the aspen are young yet,
Innocence quivers their roots
like the great frost giant it is.

Thirsty. Redolent.

But their branches, like hands, grow black with the blood
of a thousand suns. The thrill-boys, killjoys of deafening
roars slice like lightning through the rain.
The boys thundered a thousand strains of defiance
when the sea swallowed them.
They soldered the horizon to the undertow in hope of
turning the tide against the night.

But it turned itself, tired of their riot.
Eyeless, it slipped back unannounced beneath the clouded
gibbous moon, leaving the hazel and ash,
birch and aspen on the unsheltered cliffs above,
lock-jawed, while dark-needled rain crumbled
the night-sky in thunders of pale punctures, turning the
trees servant to the underbellies of ancient bones.

Fossils. Stones.
. . .

Once upon a time before the rain, before we knew
what walls and ceilings and defamations were,
we wandered the hills in search
of something elusive.
Did we know what it was?
A pale shadow, a rhizome trailing the outskirts
of a cumbersome womb.

We woke, screaming.

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