Black Seeds Hidden in Black Soil

A Solitary Romance

Each day you dream the long storyof someone in love.It is peacetime.You have books to read.They pile on the table, the kitchenfloor. They lie exhausted as loversall over the bed.The cat wants out. The coffeeburns in the pot. You have been busyrepairing the pages of sleep all your life.Now you are tired. What you need is a restnear the banks of the sacred stream.Look, how beautiful the jeweled secretof the speckled trout.The page of the day is blankand getting blanker. The spine is broken,the words have flown.What was it you meant to sayto a sky crosshatched with wiresand its one moon, its transparent garmenthung only for you?In the long avenues people are walking.The dead walk, past churches and synagogues.The frozen river sleeps.Then, without ceremony … there you are—one of the inviolate survivorsof the corner shipwreck.The flame is flickering. A storm is rising.Somewhere black seeds hidden in black soilare taking root.

Elegy for Carelessness

The little bird is caughtbehind thin nettingmade to hold fraying brickfrom falling onto touristsin the narrow lane.Leaning into the breathof the stone wall,you watch its frenzied attemptsand willed release.You see the skyas only a slit-trench of light rushing.You hear the low voicesmoving away.The things you have lovedare like that, ensnaredin something illusoryand looking back you seethat slim escapeyou kept missingin the mad flutter of daysthat sets forth andsets forth desireand a terrible banging.

A Harvest

First the rains came hard and longand loved the open field enviousof blackbirds. Everyone kepttheir distance, except for loversfor whom her skin shonelike a skein of light.

And when the survivorof storms could be felt in the muscle’s needto stretch, the whole body swelled,darkened her sex, her desireso like a pitiless needto mark out new territories,to make use of tools, ancient and diviningthe directions, a string of feathersand nettles strung on the fence.

In the end there was no choicebut to open to the chancellor of other.Mother or child, which living rootof the animal was set to fire?

Concerning the Axe

What Snyder says is true—when making the handleof the axe by cutting woodwith an axe, the model is indeedclose at hand. If it weren’t, whywould so many, after the high seatof adult cruelty, learn how to cutthe air with sharp-edged bodies,the precision of their instrumentalways cocked for opportunity.But especially for the child, the womanwith child, the animal with the wideopen heart of a field, they seek to plowto put to good use, a use, for the toolthey’ve carefully crafted and beencrafted by. The art of tacit mimicry.