Radcliffe Killam II
Memories of Love in the Field

Restless fingers move deliriously
Forging dimples and cringes.
Bodies collide
In smooth, sensual motions.

The moon peers into the window
And watches.
The stars fade into blackness.
The sun exalts the anxious creations.

Evasive light spies deep into their darkness.
Hands interlocked and clenched.
Sweat trickles and soaks the musky, tainted sheets.
Once again they play
Once again they frolic
As if flesh were spiritual.

A disregard for ethereal convention.
Bathing with fluids.
Baptizing an undeclared union.
No chants or material gifts.
Only the matter which makes them.

Blind to the natural -

Ants build upon the earth.
Mounds, like temples, grow, and multiply.
Drones enter and exit in continuous rushing thrusts,
Though oblivious to their duties.

Her hair is a silk web.
Her mate is victim and accomplice.
Wrapped within moments of rapture.
Transporting consciousness to touch,
Arms embrace expression and silent dreams.

Lips soften.
Arching necks.
Eyes cast upward.
The two forms lay in the wet grass gazing.

Ode to Aphrodite

Her sensuous silk grappled tightly.
Lush all over the sculptured body
Made not of clay, nor mud, nor marble.
Frolicking curls dance downward
And jump generously as perfection moves.
Twin suns make her vision impossibly piercing.
These eyes pry the inanimate outward.
Churches quiver. A mother trembles.
A holy child - living only in words and paint -
Resurrects to do justice and feel her sinful temptation.
She set the fall forward into progress
While inspiring more than Nature Itself.
A body of flesh, which bore the essence to grace it within.
Her touch is distant,
Though hollow am I not
For a white gaseous form plunges
Deeper inside and digs
It pauses then begins to build beyond even Babel
With no earthly insecurity falsifying and undeveloped creator
To hinder language, land, faith, nor fate.
A beauty, cyclical in state, which loved itself intently, gave life
To herself in shape of woman.
More than a rose surviving the gray, rocky mountaintops of a barren escape.
More principle than the commandments found atop of the big boulder.
More spirit than the parting of the waters.
The unfocused may see the mundane.
The cattle may graze as a herd not she.
Look to the heavens to find nothing.
Never can the sun appease my perception.
No more can I fear, feel, nor love
They sheer existence steals
My sense thus rendering me
Numb from passion.

Ranch History

Purple feathers and honey cover the horizon.
In a remote land -
In a remote family -
Lives a jaded man
With a complacent wife
And two mules - pretending to be children.

The hat, renowned and symbolizing
The western frontier, is made of straw.
Once a subtle yellow, now stained
By heat, sweat, and frustration.

Cattle roam freely within the confines.
Rusting barbed wire gives life
And struggles.
Pins lay empty and worn.

Sun up. Sun down.
Steaming coffee.
A silent rocking chair.
His son bails hay;
His other boy rides horseback.
His wife curled in a vacant bed
In a vacant home
With a vacant husband
Murmuring vacant words of division
Tries to sleep.

Reddish salt blocks
Stanch smelling, brown oat feed.
Mindless mundane cows continue the process:
Eating as work.
Sleeping without intimacy.

Capitalism pervades into solitary.
Nature and idleness corrupted.
A lizard scurries to a mesquite tree
for shade.
The man pays his bills.
The cycle returns unexpectedly.
The man dies.
A man is born.

Back to Issue 2, 1999