belladonna

for patsie aika & marlon & remembering vic reid

Early on Saturday morning about 8 o’clock in the warm chill of the <<< thirsty Botswana winter. she pick up my trail in the wide arid serengetti of these wild parts – the scrub. the xpose forums of stone. the senseh of th (e) ancient speech of salt. a long dark broken escarpment on the left of the journey i will nvr reach. the highlands low & long in the distance obscure( d) by a thin ochre of cloud. so many hidden tombs into this hollow silence of mounds

She angle(d) slowly alone. the long cool body of the hungry lioness. brow (n) bones like aggie marbles rippelling along her spine. keeping me in sight w/out seeming to hurry or tense. but the huge soft skrawl of her great length growing her steadily closer Neither of us panic. there was nothing i knew i cd do. no. where i cd go. > no palace of hide. the class. ical scenario. She needed me as badly as the scream of me that wake her the three nights before when i first enter her < dream

i was not competition but completion. like a waterhole. and there cd be no distraction no head-lifting shifting turning thinking of yesterday’s losses previous pains as they persisting. her wet senna sponge of a nose sniffing quietly & closely. almost touching the tread of my passage. foot. step after soft foot. step. where the shadowy soles of my past and her future full /fill up & fall. nvr lookin up or around. nvr turning her head. nvr trusting the noose of her eyes to the capture. leaving it all to the thrill of her nostrils. the loud wide cavern of her breath howling into her head like the >>> huge smooth vault of a trans-saharan jet-engine. takin in all the sounds of the soil of savanna. keeping her eye. lids close(d) or shuttered down to the golden slits of a whisper. tasting the silica grit of the centuries. her ancestors’ sortilege. fallowing the path to this

cross-

road. ending in/to the gift of itself like a flower or worm or child in the <<< womb. hers or mine didn’t matter. nor did conscience or consideration or justice or wither or wound or who ‘right’ or who ‘wrong’ w/the privilege. > whatever sex whatever colour or age-form or the little dry cough of her >> curse didn’t matter

She know her teeth were in place. clean & gleaming new & deeply rooted into her gumbrill. know herself perfect. ly balance(d). nerves singing their song of the megolokwane. her muscles metal & mental & ready to spring. her lungs already to take to their wing. and there was something like < lozenges something like jewels into the mouth she was sucking. hard glittering agatee diamonds from the deep down where she was reaching. keeping her pace to the carrefour

i was now beyond wild or bewilder. growing more & more like the She

who possess me. i was no longer a bird so i cdn’t fly feather. there was no water anywhere so i cdn’t return to my fish/losing my eyes in cool stream . and the land i was on was not even carapace. there was no dent or denial or crab anywhere on its scarface

not even giraffes of hope in the distant

i cd feel how she was searching the drei gully courses where my semen

had settle. the blood slowing down from the miles of its writing in the now treeless veins of my scripture. my limbs hanging down & confessing to time like a hambone already stripp of their virtue. my flesh itself limp like a driping overnight clothesline

i was now walkin slower & slower more & more infant now for this moth-

er this lover this long spondee of death to come catch up w/me in this poem since there was no more options of canticle .no mo pitch. no mo dub. no mo brush. no mo taw. and all the scansion of words i had use had drie-(d) away in the desert...