Sunless Morning

The morning of the 26th of September

all of the frost was in my teeth and hair.

I had it out the night before with a witch

who claimed to turn severed tails

into animal souls
and sodden cardboard into their bodies.

The nightwinds blew into howls
as she leaned her crooked back against

a big birch and sang to leaves as they fell.

I had my hands around a dead branch that had fallen

as she flicked her gnarled fingers through the air.

I kept saying This is Nature!

this is nature

not your stodgy incantations, frump

she just smiled and continued loosing letters

into the waning light of the moon.

This a fortune told, now this is a spell 

of some substance, this the talisman she held

above her head and thrust into the peeling bark:

orange wire wrapped around the notches of a cross,

the cross with a loop, copper and steel:

the ankh came from her fingers 

and stuck into the tree.

Cross a witch as she gilds a spirit and it will follow you.

The pine marten switches feet as it hops across the dirt,

I've been still, watching from the window a sunless morning,

watching as it hops along, tracing frost through soil

and leaving snow amid its tracks.

Life's flesh

I feel it everywhere, the bite and suck of life's flesh at my lips as its juices trickle down my front and the sweetness it can hold is wrung all from the fibers. A fiend's rush to his dope is the kiss I suck from each dull hallway waiting library sucker punch reception room drizzle desked office spacing drear. You pushed me out like a dragging soaking dog from the clean carpet tombs and white-blind bedroom spots of earth flung to the flowers all mashed beneath my heels as I glanced up at a beatific moon shining through the window in your eyes and without it I couldn't show you how I rang so truly when you clocked me that night, with your tongue so tight wrapping itself around my cerebellum's cord and thrusting heart that then I leaked all purple light and have not stopped since trying to hurl myself toward the rawness of indiscretion and in seeing you opening like a lotus first budding at the magic of my mouth and the fire oh the fire you sent from your eyes to mine the very halo sunning vibrant gods from crypto-Roman mountain peaks that minute you walked up to me and felt eager to feel me eagerly that minute I surrendered to the rush inside us both.