Rabbit and Rose
In the end, our failure to raise a visitation
became intolerable. With every grotto sealed-
long abandoned in the milky tracks
of goat-herding children and their minion
trudging the bleached yellow hillside-
we rummaged the blurred, indolent shallows
at the furthest lip of the land. Face down in the muddle,
fingers snaking through the confused bottom weeds,
we twisted a root and delivered it from the chill, defiant muck. Then raised our head to the cracking blow of a daylight
that refused to diminish its sum for our sake.
Fever-blind, we sped headlong to periphery,
haphazard shards of hope
whirling through our dazed, mute esophagus,
summoning the waters of earth
to the stinging white brine of our misbegotten thirst,
surging tiny pathetic waves abreast Gibraltar' atoms
as if that stony ecstasy of silent rock might erode
and bare its fugitive fossil,
which might dare speak
given that words might have bones,
sovereign locomotion, power of direction-
headlong into blank astringent fact,
the tincture we tasted by night-
where last we went together
mining ice for fossil memory,
and watched its rime burn away
beneath dawn-rise,
in whose heat we hid the weeping sun
revolving in our belly,
awaiting birth into a sky,
any sky-
any sky at all.