THE GOAT KILLER
I become him.
Barefanged in the crossing, chasing
for whatever’s worth
the chasing:
amazing tricks, legerdemains,
the horizon or his own shaggy old tail,
allusive moving trucks
in dog day afternoons in Patmos,
forever searching
for whatever’s worth
the searching.
*
Sleepless lightning
haunts abandoned backroads.
The night is coiled
and the billboards are afraid.
I am walking by your side
on the unsuspecting street
and already it’s too late.
The same arrant moon
that drank with a monk once,
aslant over larkspur, wolfsbane,
is a skull howling at me,
overflowing my kapala
with sweetest wine from joy and sorrow,
strained from the pith of unrhymed lives
trod into bitter must by trampling mad feet,
the dashing beat of rock against ship,
in unreasonable, absurd meters like this line’s.
*
I’ll explain:
Say a ray of light
stabs the Sunday at an angle,
say the underbrush shivers:
Ductile dactyls / sauntering nearby / scamper / leaving trochees in their wake.
From an overreaching lunge
rebounding, squaring,
angling for the tackling,
I chase it,
bullrushing, bushwhacking
down darkened garden paths,
sentencing urns to crash
(blossoms of brittle shards glitter,
well-wrought, though broken).
Lips graze and nab the idea,
cold bone encasing hot marrow.
Teeth chisel marble. Attrition.
Soon there’s a mutual giving
and dawn’s rosy offal
gushes out over all things:
“Exacting knife of adamant light,
unswerving,
dread plummet sounding all our hours,
harrow, trawl line, clock hand,
flame that burns away the dross
that gathers moss-like inbetween days”.
Y’know, stuff like that.
*
Snow dances in sunken cathedrals.
It’s Winter
and it’s going to be Winter.
Now my kind must live on wind.
Alone I waylay
shepherd and town guard
and wait every night
for the tug in the line.
Agape and aflame
I hound and devour
the star and her wound,
bitter still beating heart.
I tear and I gnaw / at the sinews of that heart / and I rend it. / I have learned that first one eats it, / then one understands it.
*
It becomes me:
Many-colored, monstrous,
the tallest peak in Arcadia,
Lykaion of blood-lapping stones,
growling in a graveyard
in the evening of meaning,
dreaming, committing to paper,
dreamt, committed to flesh,
glossing the shields of memory
in the off-chance of existence,
singing myself to sheep
over tall governing bodies
that grovel and threaten
the polls and the market,
the maddening clattering
of skeletons dancing,
the deafening bleating
of longing and drearing.
*
All manner of game
and birds transfixed.
Affixed midflight
and eaten.
*
Nothing escapes me.
Everything leaves me.
