earth – other animals

Here’s a very happy Friday excerpt from Fragment…

would lead you to believe I do appreciate it all and other times I can manage a laugh that wiggles out from under tons of earth in which I tried to dance but perhaps soon I can emerge though the soil is cool and cruel though maybe I’ll stay here with the low rumble of worms and voles in my ears and make a home no matter what they dump on top of me or how the plates collide one day this dump could be a mountain range higher than the Himalayas with me pressed between an ancient deli meat

what thread dropped after
the cicada passed
or what mist started
to build in the part
of the story where
your eyes blur and your
feet grow clammy on
the earth of fresh graves

Venus over my shoulder on sharp frozen earth these uncut toes

(First published in Modern Haiku.)

In the morning you can reach out and see on the breeze in the mind the damp stone tightening straps keep him in place the pain in his cell the confession conversion meaningless at this point or the life by the sea rough stone grey the children I pushed through and lined up in the earth and the cliffs so beautiful lonely one time one town on the frontier barely built I can still smell new cut wood that simple home sun creeping through seams in the wall another sunny place warm weather sweet breeze always fetching writing down his many thoughts the wine was good

when you tried to kiss that star and fell haltingly down to an earth full of vole tracks and pebbles left from the unending work of burrows your mouth burnt but with the promise of new tender skin you walk on

though it swings this way twice a day few have so much as caught a whiff of its fur that shines with the earth’s last greasy riches

summer evening
the old dog slowly digs
the earth