Like a river,
drawn and quartered by a bastard’s temperament.
skewered with punctuation,
or skewed: qui vive?
why is Spring compelled to kill for its young?
the watery garden below: a perfumed pillow of oblivion settles there; the Lethe, Charon, or the Nile? Gihon? The Euphrates? Tigris? Pishon? The mighty Mississippi?
All great dividers, the language of the earth
where wicked waters now flow,
stir up mud and bone-flake,
only to tease the leech:
its days spent sleeping,
dreaming blood in-between seasons,
envisioning winter’s cold comfort
and summer’s mouth of fire;
child-like nomad, or is it monad?
That one Thing: a constant,
a repetition: an old rope frayed, dangling somewhere in the middle of a tiny wave,
tethered to a grain of salt: dissolving
under
the moon’s wretched influence,
pulling taut the earth’s bruised and battered veins:
a specter at the feast of tides.
ghosts licking at the shoreline:
clear Heraclitean water made turbid
by thrashing
oneself a-
wake.
Distant mother,
giving birth to the deluge of worldless words,
in hived water
where Alpheus chases his love,
sings,
or weeps,
One can never tell.
But the rust in the water
belongs
to
us,
…and the leech will have his fill.
