The Spectre of All Things
Every five years or so
a monster would be born in angel country,
this is what was said to me:
and so we wait, the seasons
spooling behind us like loose thread,
calling for hardness like a prophet.
I’m told something beautiful is coming,
because of you. A silence every morning
before the noise begins.
A hush in the goats’ shed. It lives where I live.
My coats damp, heavy as a plague --
and a woman says when I first heard of it
I had a friend dig it out with a hunting knife.
--
How I am too afraid to believe that
the whispers in the fields are all about my belly,
about my blood. How, the year before it happens,
men’s fists break like shatter-lamps.
How the iron cracks and the bones
are sawn off with fishhooks, and the ground is
winter-wet, and the earth comes up to meet them
when they fall.
--
In this snow-shocked, hard-toothed land,
too far from anything to know, the dark comes
like a violet artery. It comes quick. I think of
eating myself
to taste what light was left on me by the mark --
It’s hours of false-night, cold. And outside, I walk
to clutching hands, to faces turned to me
or to the black-flat sky like hunger to a spoon.
Their eyes too close,
the wind dropping to a murmur,
born good, made wrong.
Every five years or so
a monster would be born in angel country,
this is what was said to me:
and so we wait, the seasons
spooling behind us like loose thread,
calling for hardness like a prophet.
I’m told something beautiful is coming,
because of you. A silence every morning
before the noise begins.
A hush in the goats’ shed. It lives where I live.
My coats damp, heavy as a plague --
and a woman says when I first heard of it
I had a friend dig it out with a hunting knife.
--
How I am too afraid to believe that
the whispers in the fields are all about my belly,
about my blood. How, the year before it happens,
men’s fists break like shatter-lamps.
How the iron cracks and the bones
are sawn off with fishhooks, and the ground is
winter-wet, and the earth comes up to meet them
when they fall.
--
In this snow-shocked, hard-toothed land,
too far from anything to know, the dark comes
like a violet artery. It comes quick. I think of
eating myself
to taste what light was left on me by the mark --
It’s hours of false-night, cold. And outside, I walk
to clutching hands, to faces turned to me
or to the black-flat sky like hunger to a spoon.
Their eyes too close,
the wind dropping to a murmur,
born good, made wrong.