Two in the Thickness

Look! the copse that’s
sleeping inside of you,

overflown persistent cough,
and all that medicine purging
terror in your spun head.
I’ve gone quite stupidly drunk
into the riverbed again, Scuzzy,
you mainecoon, deep upon
our hale and holy bloom

you’re in a beautiful,
such fitful mood today,
weaving names of flowers
well into our conversation,
and eating poached eggs that look
like amnions out of which
would crawl the paraclete,
keening and canted in
its own birth mess,
letting on
that at least one
third of the brat
feels badly over what
he’s done to you
in his long drift

amid big rain you'd
place him next to the vulvate
orchid on your desk,
observing ripe death deepen
in his eyes and marbleize, but he
never drying out, not sere and
always soaked in womb.
hemic little body
reminiscent of how sweetwet
we are in the mouth of the void,
urging neglect to
him still always more.

yet your relatives
would nurse our squab, their
faith about-face
from an abyss,
he’d rarefy all the air for them,
testing sinews
before eating in pieces
the same who
attend to him,
until one finally might light
upon his thick-grown
white bloody neck
rising quick through our
southern lack of winterland, the flight
herald of nothing,
pale and lonely
past bold upper states,
where Saskatchewan,
beckoning,
would open up
her thighs for us;

hers is the riverbed I
am knee deep in,

and no,
symbol of the fire means
nothing to me anymore,
lone or otherwise:
recall my body’s initial adverse
reaction to the love,
as if blooded and hunted,
through sheets, or cascades,
all of me some younglegged
fur ever divining
another new snare
to accrue and come down upon,

I felt ashamed,
and vulnerable there in the trap,
the fibrous slivers of my shins retted;
sugary stalks against the teeth
of a dumb vicious swain,

you touched my face then,
very nicely,
and I wanted to be done,
walking gauntly up the hill
with my leg-sunk metal
dragged behind,
clean and alone together
‘neath a low-hanging
gray sleepy blue sky;
the wept fig branches
crowning the knoll and
denuded in cold to mimic
a mad thicket of spiders’
legs,
our heads among them
far within them,
make of us perforate stark forms,
so that what little sun goes curiously right through,
and all currents too.

the bird is gone beyond these brambles,
and never was,
only us looking north
with the unbroken scarcity of
our shadow cast
in any direction,

and now that copse,
big freshly awake,
is only a web to stick
one's arm into
seething,
cavernous,
glorious
you;