Moon Phase III: Waning

A nest of paper scraps and ribbon hid among the horns-

below the canopy of overarching antlers, twisted like bramble stalks,

the sparrow builds.

patient claws clinging to the shadows, the talons of a hunter made much too small,

the plumage dappled with nakedness, the breast humbly bared,

but her hood, black as the airless night-

her hood is the old hood of death.

His horns are beautiful with nonsense. His belly laugh is an ox-bellow that breaks the night,

His mismatched eyes call like the pulse of a beacon:

"Come hither, you who reek of pain, you whose eyes blister with envy,

lustful cry of earth, snort of dark glee, all things who scream "I!" from the core of your souls:
Come hither to me."

The spirits shriek and flutter.

The sparrow cuts with iron wings.

Above, the moon draws aside to think, turning into blackness, swathed with misfortune,

the clouds are thrown over the stars:

into the old egg of blackness

the infinite mouth of the infinite serpent

the sparrow departs.

Moon Phase II: Full

I fell, hands chafing, the length of your plumb-line

until purchase caught my ragged skin, and I hung,

feet kicking in an open cosmos.

God, and the night was huge; slow colonies of ice were lit, like fields of eyes,

from God only knows what light.

My body caught the beams: a kaleidoscope, a snakeskin, a storm with an unseeable eye;

as I hung, arms turning to lead, turning to fire,

my own blood, singing with warmth, slowly pulled like a dragon's-head of rivers, down around my flesh,

much the way in which the icicles made themselves, and the bones

came to rest in the silt.

I wrap myself in a blanket of conjecture. Right above my axis

amongst untended fruit, ripening in cradles of grasses and roots,

two lovers sit, magnetic, eyes as big as oranges, breasts as full as the moon,

black brambles of hair, olive pits in succulent eyes,

themselves beyond ripe.

The branches are a black bower, warding the strange purple of the night,

incubating the clinging hearts until they sweeten,

burst, and are eaten.

Moon Phase I: Waxing

I wept to know you

I captured you with ropes from my micah shards of eyes. You glittered your changing sunlight in their surface,

black like the exhaust streaked on the snow.

They are opaque, my teary planes of eyes, black and ruthless with meaning.

Black like bones in the fire.

I hide them, if I can, behind shaded glasses. At night it doesn't matter,

my eyes eat the crackling light of the streetlamps, the velvet rubbed off by the moon;

they slowly despoil the world of secrets.

And you are lined with neon, girl of the night,

my skin crawls as I watch you fluoresce.

Your breasts swell with dirty radiation. Your curves are struck from the plasma of a star.

You are white and cream and brown, like the milk of poppies,

like the sparkling facets, too small to see, that twinkle in my eyes.