The Well-Door Sang a Green Song, and: Watchword / Lullaby

The Well-Door Sang a Green Song

cast a church inside the old world (outside day) return the animals’ song

nothing hidden sang in the preterit light as the body’s guest

someone called bees their third country men speak slowly from bread’s heavy heart

children bunching & scattering in the little now

dark bees in the fields, another church prayer’s broken year

I mean: the soul, almost beautiful, knows fire

Watchword / Lullaby

O sleeping things in the light glistering away from the edge, bacterial— I taste your rough breathing. It’s like a shell abandoned by its mollusk: nacreous, enspiraled at the flesh-hinge. Treasure is where the body finds it, adrift in the nerves’ crude pulse. Be a grain unto me, all weeping nights. I lift you from the tidelands of memory, a catchment, a weak net that stains each stab of exigence with its hemlock spine. You remember my children, the pale ones suckling the needles, their water-clocks tuned to decay at the root. I am teaching them to read you. I am standing here, in a clearing, recalling all that is not purpose. O sleeping things, hunters move among you as in a dream and we are not so different. Be a flesh to my striding-places. I will lance you like the humming wound you trace on the ember of some other, better water.