circular breathing

the snake slithers lost

sees the old places

disappearing.


it does not remember

everywhere all around the old palaces canyons of music

hung unsupported from the sky, invisible.


the heart of the fig was still cold

a live inner red of hibiscus


graves stay fresh, diaries with dates
but no years, suspended

timeliness.


in a sort of morning languour and at the sleep's edge
a lion peeps in inquisitive. make instruments of snake-skin

drive them out from paradise, but their body still holds some. walk


and walk and walk to see these last lions.

& images bloat and wave away,
swollen eyed & with the slashed tafetta

torn silk of rumpled skin


walk and walk and walk to see
waterbuck

catch polymbronic wasps


move in the sand's city like a snake on water
writing a disappearing script a

horse in orbiting gallop


like children's voices burying deeper
in time as it passes


eyes untouchable & in a different layer
from the faces in the old
sepia's oyster'd womb.


the grandmother's arms that reach below the knees
her looking perched in some elsewhere


some older past of the past
to her granma whose figure

did not come up legible
in these mediums of dark

so lost its the oldest memory

of the oldest when the oldest was
young she was beautiful


but not alive in light no memory
but mine and i cannot breathe

her luminosity into the camera's eye

so yes lost and the loss of even what was
lost and many many further mores-


her gait that of the cross rhyming drums.


the outermost rind of the brain perspiring

in this heat's evocation of ghost.


such landscapes command belief and no
malarial malaise resolves


a second, a third, a hundredth funeral and still
the ghost dissolves recurs calls deciphers

our hand's writing

her smile her briefcase her glasses her slipping
hearing her beer


2. yellowish curve contours the late
afternoon's high plain. midst painted canvas tepees & boarded up
small businesses by wet after-rain potholes,

a miniature stadium where the cameras catch up
on the dancers between 7 bass drums & amplification equipment
& soft voiced mcs making a strike for each tribe

from somewhere ornamented voices in falsetto,
vocables in a united concentrate & then
single file flamboyance, singers in farmer's caps

men dance alone, women in 2s & 3s

hours & hours of this owl-ish monophonic dance midst brief,
interrupting ceremonies beating percussive plancks & gambling bones & curing
by medicinal bundles & viscera of small local animals

wind instruments represent the superb naturale buttons
right song for the right anything, anything can be made
more auspicious more potent memorable w strings of deer hoove




3. night's cold

wave-rushes / the zebra's eye

lash lone in the single / intruding,


invading silence of space and


gorge. glad of

the hour's temptation for it was the path


elephants loved for its moistness an' shade



night runs its frenzy like a mute/ rolling, mountain range :-


3. one day i decided/to open that door again

to profane the relic, to put back the wandering ghosts amid the mice & bats

them bespectacled ghosts sucking at beehives, wearing snakeskin
trailing rat droppings.

how they solved the past
slowed the frame drank the carbolic acid.

they had no hunger. their teeth were failing falling

they needed no food. some petulantly obese some thin as teenagers

five red flames ring their hair they look unappeasably sad under unblinking lashes


i did not disturb them. i closed the door again.


4. ensphered in rain


a mosquito net afloat in sapphire forest air.

to the ear's farthest horizon again

again

the rain's pitterpatterpitterpitterpatterpitter roar


again-against



ascends the cochlea's spiral