A FOX THOUGHT
For Ted Hughes
I imagine a landscape of your poems:
A sacred wood, a pagan burial ground
Where the eyes of wildlife blood red
devour prey. Surrounded by darkness
of gothic tales. Cold moons fall on
a perpetual November sky.
Winter soil on your chalk white flesh
Deep in the womb of your savage earth.
The nonchalant delight of you toil, free
from the vulva noose. That something
else is alive unseen, black velvet feathers
oiled in crude sway within black rainbows
And peck your birds-eye tomb vision.
Rain from a broken gutter spout, your poems
Gush with cold delight, the purification
Of a stagnant well.
THE BIRDS BEE’S TREES IN ME
The trees are within me
They sway, bend and bow.
I am like the evergreen leaf
That climbs so dark in green
On blue and grey that fills
My day with light and dark
And light, it fills my day with
Things to say that roll off
of my tongue.
I am but a stinging fly that
Leaves it mark on life.
I’ll
Scar your heart and hurt
Your head in these words
That I say. You
will search
Your mind while the world
Winds me astray.
The birds
Fly into the wind but blows
Back to bend and bow, the world
Winds and lets us know, soon we
Will find its purpose will be beneath
the trees standing
firm to grow.
The black and white bird
Sat on the roof, preening
In a melancholic nonchalance
Just being black and white.
The people in the house
Were up and down, the teen-
Age girl was praying to a re-
Flection in the mirror, the dad
Seen himself on the news.
The bird flew away into empty sky
This pome cuts through language
Like a high dose antidepressant.
There is no such thing as depression
Just a depressed life. What do you do
If you’re done, a shell without memory
No thing to cling on to, how do you be-
Come a cling on if your mind is full
Of emptiness.
