while in the interlocking circles, action
has retreated to the depth of decades where
love's first star's still propped up in
its empty blue. So whenever something near
shines the boy-man closes his face, quickly turns away
from more than rumors on the wind , from far
back, speaking evacuated houses, dues paid
in blood. Now through the rusty drizzle of chrysanthemums
he hears a drumming from where water pools, delayed,
slips through rocks, over the abandoned road, runs
through the dead yew's roots into the orchard where
over-ripe apples still hang, and the nightly procession's left some
scraps and shreds like shadows caught there
on bushes, stirring when a lost child passes,
a breath inside the ghost, hanging here,
·the fruit of nightmare, picked again by hands that catch
at, grope, suborn,
a fantasy come home,
forever he's leaving his own life, fast
and faster, manchild impaled on the shrike's thorn
of his own mind, hearing voices of women
fainter, half-light wrapped loose around them.
While on horseback, painted phallus with eyes strapped on,
the father still gathers him for distances
cranes know, making long streaks of themselves in
air.
It's not wrong.
Kept a child. That voice professes
everything unchanged, praises the "natural";
via parody, everything's a dance, of weariness;
that authority in the very waves' back- curl's
always about to swamp his little boat
with innuendoed intimacies. The call
of a wild dog limps away. Silence bloats.
