~PART 3:  …to the woods

The forest is beguiled by a transitory lullaby —
a father, from the depths of loss, murmuring
subtle sounds in the heart of the woods.
The trees harness his voice and crack the sky,
crack the fading light so the night can
hold its echo hostage to a third or fourth degree.
Till the wilds run free, unassailed by reverence,
carried by the night-woods, they texturize his will.
He is crumbling from within…
their echo turns his dewy blood to dust.

•   •   •

Sometimes the rain is silent.
Sometimes it bears witness to violence
without losing its luster.
He wears his bones now like ash
beneath the poisoned grove where roots and
their underpinnings slash their pin-prick tails; —
he is worrying the broken soil in his broken fists
like a mouthless prayer unadorned by beauty,
for there are no voices here within the lyric of the dead.
It fades — the percussive intricacies of wind invade.

•

©2022: Zoëtrope in Words. All rights reserved.

~ 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.

•

©2022: Zoëtrope in Words. All rights reserved.

~Part 2:
REBEL

What was it that imprinted the cosmos into
the beats of our hearts?
The melancholy?
The convalescence?
The inhale?
Its nemesis?
Almost as if Love becomes its own dimension
like time, or a force akin to entropy, but
unlike the spintop-whip of entropy observed,
it carves back into itself instead of out.

The bold one holds a whisper to my ear,
is it you?
A hurricane in the palm of your hand,—
the bishop’s refrain, “What we have,
we have to share,”— it’s everywhere.
Like chaos complete,
Christ in a riddle,
eternity in a the eyes of a dog,
the loyal grow old but their hearts never do.

You curdled the lyrics of a ditty
so incomplete I had yet to mouth the words.
A sharp tug in the throat
like a burden of souls
washed down with spiced rum or a
snifter of something drier; —
you never were the sage, the mystic,
the one who wrinkled water like
it was a costume for a masquerade.
No. More like silk, or thyme soaked in
fragments of rage.

Yet you lingered over words in your
own language, sweetened in the
nectar of desire for things
you could never own.

And we ran.
Ran into the trees, into the breeze,
the tease of a madman at our heels
in obtuse degrees.
The asylum forgets our sanity,
buries our reason, our honor, our minds
in hubris, where bold men make
mockery of our strange desires,
the fires of bold denials of lies.

The cliff-jumpers catch their death.
They’d rather dare than dread
the outcome. We are not so different.
But history
is more profound than
the tales we’ve been fed.
Silence, the adulteration of reality.
If we don’t speak,
it may yet get the best of us.
O, holy riot of the mind.

Yet, rebels will never hold
their tongues
or actions.
The rebels know better than man’s
inhumanity to man, or beast;—
they know, as do we (for we are they),
that silence must be broken
if men are to be made whole again.

•

©2022: Zoëtrope in Words. All rights reserved.