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.
I know it's like a faux pas for the author to be posting explanatory comments, but I thought this one deserved it, just this once. The poem is like a dream sequence or picture, or whatever you call that, of course. Its theme, however, is a comment on the well-known Zen parable about the misfortunate man who was hanging off a cliff, above alligators, below wolves, by a rope that was being chewed on by mice. And, the story goes, there was a wild strawberry growing from the cliff edge. So the man reached out and plucked it, and my, how sweet it tasted!
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