The Melting Place
(published in The Dalhousie Review)
Culture has taken over from nature as the
primary factor in evolutionary selection – Arthur Koestler
Winter morning, gathering dawnlight,
crawling into a narrow embrace,
we cluster and breakfast on clannishness,
break slowly and scatter, a daily diaspora
in search of the pale sun.
Drawn back at nightfall by invisible threads,
we feed on each other, drawing and quickening,
tugging and suckling, we pull on each other,
mixing our blood, gathering ley lines
infused, we have been here before.
Survivors, returned to a field where grass
is rusted with iron falling from the sky,
a world exploding. Your hair turns white
as starlight, my love, our skin burns.
Lay with me on this hematic earth,
pulling shoals of fish upstream,
stroking stones, bursting. Hear
the wind bending aslant our skin,
cooling the blistered night. Grass
knifes through the earth, piercing your tongue,
stars shoot from my eyes, rivers
flow backwards, I swallow the world and give it
back to you, rolling on your tongue,
tiny flames burning around us,
floating in soft wax, melting
all around us, we are melting, my love,
as the universe flares, extinguished.