Spring

The Floor-Creatures Begin

3 The Floor-Creatures Begin The skin was stretched tauter, fastened through the metal hoop—membrane of sky over the earth’s frame—and the sun struck its last hour with a mallet wrapped in violet yarn, tones that rose to the surface, the red swirls deepening to violet (the disturbed blood darkening) and outward in shade to the boundaries (a deep tumultuous sleep) until the skein grew dark to its edges (a consuming sleep of coughs). (And the sound, some dry kindling burning, the crisp, the tiny sputtering, rupture of the throat into sediment and sod. It could be the desiccated remnants of stems in the harvested Āeld. It could be a lean-to of sticks, and then the deaf, burning that which they call unsacred. The deaf, dividing and dividing again that smallest vial of God’s voice— ) Between the ground, between the sky, the animals call out. A velveteen ear, the black air quivering: the pine needles gathered in a spur. And how what was spoken, too, expanded to the running edges— the tundra, the vast veldt, the funnel of black wings landing on the rock en masse, a smoothing, a soothing of black, the indivisible plumage and the mass of black flies hovering over an arctic wave. 4 Over the ocean a white bird drops out of the sky then flies up again, out, wet with a writhing piece from the volume, and the volume seals over, and the hole Ālls itself with spill from around— (What, like an army of needles, if all the white birds fell at once from their formation, a decided drop, if all the white birds banked steep to the sun-eye to dive like venom-tipped stingers, sore for the job. Sore as the disheveled petals of lilies, as the rubbed lens of the netherworld tread on, and then the white wings skewered from the water, strung like sails for a body. The floor-creatures begin then to desire. A dagger to the hilt of water—) The teeming liquid curls in— But inside the umbrage of the curve, in the lining of its velvet furl: a thought of petal—is it you, viscous address of the center of flowers? Dusted on the Āne, the gathering legs? Dusted on the tongue, a seeding to blossom? (Is it you, underwhisper of song? Open; tell me again— ) ...