The world’s breath and mystery
end here, earth’s innards engorged -
sprawled redly coast to coast.
*
If streets had cobblestones
blood would flow in tatters - torn
flags to a revolution lost. Streets
smoothly ease to drains. The cut deep,
and blood wakes from its blackness,
crushed as berries in the runnels
of a wagon, oozes its oil from
the body’s casket - til flesh becomes
porcelain, perfect surface for moon,
ice, the glass-edged sky to play upon;
in silences deep as birch in the
bayoneting dark - and leaves finally
resemble paper money piled up
under the turbined lamplight.A Public Works draughtsman spent thirty years designing the City Sewerage Reticulation System he eventually hoped to escape through - a masterpiece! A prairie dog would have been proud of it. Complex of accented runs, angles, drops, sluices, pumps, ditches, endless unbowed archways, treatment ponds breaking into sunlight - the architects of Athens would have been proud of it. Only on paper - not one trowel lifted! miles and miles and miles of it.

Pyrrha, your dewy hair, yellow, scented, doubly wreathed in Jasmine, fresh from the trellis this morning - your new lover yet to arrive, breathless. Your tantrums are as sea-storms, heart-wrecking for that unsuspecting voyager - maybe as survivor, I might warn him against your squally lust, he won’t find safe haven in your arms! This note is record enough - that I set down against your lubricous hold. See: Horace’s ‘Pyrrha’ ode. I,v.

The flames above the wall, private show for the Gods, the city burned three days, at night, smoke warmed the stars. Border forest shifted with shields - scritch-owl, a horse’s impatient breath - the hawk wheeled under a pennant moon. In the grey dawn men turned North. The druid notched these events onto trunks that lead to deeper wood - envisioned - silence, incantation; the God found within the stone.

Once cradle of civilization - now crucible, a sandstorm of tanks, a battery of rocket-launchers each one bright as a guiding star slams home to its birthplace, sand sprites leap dervishly, limbs gad about, horses buckle back upon themselves - empty out like exhausted bellows. A beggar (in nameless rags) calls out in either prayer or curse to the desert night first refuge for saints; 

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