The suns themselves have multiplied and spent Their smear of gold against my body, Melting the marrow out. Circle on circle, The round day divides my being like a planet 5 ---Into two halves--- a shadow forecast falling Beneath my heel, as I walk. Bending ancient in a garden, twisting stalk Of buried carrot or sere tomato Wasted by the day, I watch 10 Ruined plaster hands majestically drop In sudden rain or broken rage of age And know they are my own: intimate, incarnate. Time spent dreaming, swinging on the garden gate, Pulling tender acorns from the antique tree, too proud 15 To labor water into fruit, is past. I meditate Scuttle of fat rabbits that shift in frosted hate Like a pair of nations, once great, now bickering Over vegetables slouching in a ditch. I am victim to the fading vision of a face 20 Unlike my own, whose articulate bare beauty burns And deepens at a glance. My wide mouth Is crippled and full of sticks, Red daubs against a glass, when I perceive The swiveled shining of her countenance, a fist of wicks. 25 And still I see her able eye or able hand Pale in the singed mist lechery has left--- Residue of torches, motionless, transfixed. Her, whose youth was whispered skyward As I sowed discord among more murderous men, 30 And friendless men, who loved more Formless anarchy and mere gold. I bolt back the ruined latch like a rifle to see How time has clicked its picket into place. I stand inside the unimagined shadow of a tree 35 While shadow forms of a shadow world surround The half-turned plot. And I have lived the wire-model Of a life, an old skeleton dissolving in the sun. I dream of a self not worn down by days, As who would not rebuild what grew awry, 40 And love aright what Love could not define? Now crashed beneath the awful awning of an oak, Politic of history, adverse to time, alone--- I start To rend the bone from heart.
From the collection "Divine Revolt"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.