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Craters: with Michel Leiris
- Wesleyan University Press
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Craters with Michel Leiris Roots out of the ground and ongoing The way we are, some of them— Spokes earth-slats a raft made of humped planks Slung down and that's right: wired together By the horizon: it's what these roads Are growing through: fatal roads, No encounters, the hacked grass burning with battle-song— Then when we get our voices together, When we mix in that savage way, in the gully of throats Where the fog piles up, and we turn our long cadences loose Over the grooved pasture, the running fence of song Will flap and mount straight up for miles Very high, all staring stridulation, Softer than beer-hops: one of the days when the wind breathes slackly, Making the lightest perches tremble Like hostile stemsinterlacing, As in the heart a lock of blond hair knots on itself Suicidally,insolubly someone will plough-out a door, A staircase will dig itself down, its haunted spiral Will blacken and come out Where the ashes of those who were once turned to Pompeian lava Will abandon their smouldering silkworks, Their velvet slags, and take on the courtliness Of ghosts: then, then the sky will be gone from us 58 Forever, we wretched ones who can love nothing But light. Such will the craters tell you — any crater Will tell you, dry-heaving and crouching: will tell us we've stumbled Onto one: we're in one, dry-heaving and crouching. 59 ...