You are the blaze of marine stars
Piled high in a corner
Your pyramid is sharp and rounded
Lay me on your beech dunes
As we float, on conversation supple and smooth like silk
While our breaths float and bounce
Captives in bubbles of the thinnest thought
Black thin lines frame our faces
Yours, serious studious methodical smiling
Mine, agape questions rolling across features
Tell me how you did it
Toadstools surround us
Nodding in cherubic agreement
Small calves to our lowing
This Egypt you built
Pieces and more pieces
Is it layers that sweep down your peaks?
Blinding me, I only see your outlines
Hard angles yet no severity
The storms of your muses
Settle in the purest shapes
And the most serene ideas
These small scale against the larger
Yet nothing loses its intensity
Or simple beauty.

Oct. 31/98

A man farms men
A great sickle sword
Harvests bodies bales limbs
Binds one upon the other upon the other
Battle a great threshing
Arms wheeling a combine
And low there the bodies fall
Clanking of armor and bloody leather
Burbling cries and last long moans
Eyes raised and then roll back
Amidst the fleshy division of muscle
The crushing halt into bone
The sucking pull of the wound
Being released by the blade
The grunt the roar the barbarous bawling
That crawls into the belly of men
Chasing out all but one sound
The din dazzles the darkest desires
Smell blood, taste sweat, hunt
Reducing to gristle and grit
Thundering jabber
An arm, a weapon, a fist
To be reaper of men

May 5, 2000