Matter's Bone

We are that which is stirring in stone.
Give me the light breaking through ruins.
This body,
A dwelling of hidden veins.

Draw back the curtain on centuries:
It is the sun in the spilled blood
Of crusades.
It is the sun that laps up the bursting flesh of cherries;
Dances in the wild ignorance of youth.

We must be a height of summer;
This electric touch — this hand that sings,
Sweat of sound:
Breaking the taste of heat over the present
Which tips wildly
Into spinning darkness.

Dark, compressed stone
This sealed sleep of
matter’s bone.
How we drift without fire;
Lust for lightning
Like tongues bathed in blue crystal mountain’s spring.

Garden of the body
Wets the ground with semen upon rich soil.
Breathing
Mingled with worms
Lies the stone of death
Which soaks up the fluid of the body.
Carrion
Picks over the bones.

We are given over to ages;
Turned and turned like the cracking thunder
Which splits the ancestral stone.
Fleshly cave:
The skeleton of a bird, a fish, a mantis, a star
Lingering — sediment of the dew.

Worlds of amber carry the dead;
Worlds of ice and stone besides. Etched,
Spirals into the red grave of blood,
Chiseled into the flesh of the plateau.

Give us this brief clay, which writhes —
Steam of the brain’s weaving
Cast from the geode of the body.

We emerge from screaming ages of bacterial wars.
Oxygenated compressions
Heaving from the oceans.
How the mind was black silences.
Desperate, writhing,
For the link that would spark the dawning mind.

Remember the dead in stone,
Buried in the mountains;
Carved into the coal; vats of bubbling fluid
Oil’s blood.
They swim in the deeps of the volcano:
Near to the fiery heart —
Stripped to the bone.
Drained of life.

That which keeps us, the warm blood:
Sparking,
Alight — flint to the dew of fire
Which screams to the black adrift.
Let this life storm of passions;
Meet in the ecstatic lover’s kiss
Burning the time of skin —

This thin thread of ash
Between births:
Universes
Of starry geometry.