I. Birth in Cadence

1. The unending scraping –

Shavings helix
down to hardwood, glean sawdust between
furrows that make questions of
eyes.
Splinters of mistletoe
pierce calluses,
puddle between his fingers.

2. White skeletons in gloom –

Iapetus’
scrimshawed hands trace the grain, worrying
at blackened knots.  The shadows
cast
by an unformed jawbone
are blazed on bark,
a pathway cut in cedar.

3. Striking tombs with his heel –

The blade obeys.  
Tiny in his unmarked fingertips,
it answers every question,
speaks
only when spoken to:
the perfect child,
forming the imperfect child.


II. Our Winged Shoes

sloughed
  across marble floors, hid us
    in cerebellan shadows.  

In stolen tombs,
  we formed ourselves
    from Georgia clay.

Baking waxpaper skins on red flesh,
  we kneaded and kilned our forms
    to slick imperfection.

We saw what we had made,
  and we were good:
    the seventh day.

We touched coals to our own lips,
  placed crowns on our own heads.
    Our fingertips charred and crisped.

We spoke.
  And we were bone and flesh
    after our own image.

And while the eagle we formed
  plucked out our livers,
    our milk-white teeth flashed in pride.

But the things we named
  mouths mimicked confusion
    as we wondered:

why did the beak we created
  make itself into a thing
    we could not understand?


III. An Averted Gaze

1. Perseus

Lamps
birth spinning
pools of rainbows. I crumble.
Watered glass
reflects nothing.

My
fingertips
fade into translucence, burn
cold against
my shivering chest.

Kelp
purls slick curves
in my ribs’ hollows, granite
walls yielding:
I come unraveled.

2. Medusa

Lamps
cloak surf in
shadows and flame.  I cower.
Sand weathers
my canyoned cheeks

My
atmosphere
and your skin glisten, tempered
silk against
my whimpered hisses.

Kelp
writhes like snakes
burnt into my thighs, my sea
walls quailing:
moths in the storm's surge.


IV. The Birth of Pegasus

1. Water

is life, she said. The plankton
glistened, slick in halos:
neon oilslicks, scales
scraped across her skin,
and heartbeats skipped like hopscotch.  
Tides wore pebbles into
spheres. She fell. Surf foamed
white, then pink, then red,
flaying paleness into  
a colored stone in woman's
form, half-sunk between
salted grass and sea.  
The sand turned, splintered,
froze in the driving waves.

2. He spits

prayers and syllables
and consonants that bleed
teeth. An oroborous
calls his whispers gravelled
nonsense. Ink-wet floors
unmake vowels, shriek
of dirtied sheets: diamond
heads and thinning eyes
flatten, crunching thickly,
and hiss of greatness, then
of pain, and then of nothing.
His drying wings curl black
around the whitened bulbs:
absence creates presence.


V. Breaking

She cantilevers her wings like doors,
feathers clicking, locks in her back.
The bit strangles her words. They leap
(a thousand red ants) from her mouth
and march across the things they unmake
that crawl, tremble, still.

He bridles smiles, sucks cold air across his teeth.
Questions whip
his forehead slack, his cheeks tight.
What scorpions burn his eyes in this wind?  

With one spurred heel,
he carves a red staff and a fugue
into her white parchment,
pulls lullabies from her arched spine.


VI. Condemned

Fear padded past
  the heap of dog-sucked marrow,
its three jaws slick,
    wet and gray.
The ember, frail and pierced by mistletoe,

chars veils while twilight
  darkens noon,
cowers cracking
    at the ice-burnt chains,
shivers back across the stone,

and laughs at all
  the weighted, breaking oaks.
Medusa's lover
    wakes, and primes
the ember, slowly grasping mistletoe

and wringing darkness
  from cthonic locks.
He chips obsidian,
    whistles requiems
and sloughs his way across the stone.

A skirted lily writhes
  in his frost-tipped wake.
Ash whips vinegar
    and peregrines;
the ember, freed from panted missives, slowly

slaughters wisdom's
  whispers.  Flames
brand circles into
    blackened, yielding forms
that slough their way across the stone:
      the ember, freed at last by mistletoe.


VII.Musings of a Granite Sphere

I am the center of all things,
the preternatural axis around which
the world spins, the browns and grays
twining puddles at my base.

I             center     all things,
he   re      at        a             
       wor       n                              gray
             puddle

I am                      all things
       pre   natural         a     nd
he w             n,                  s and
    in                       m         e.

I am   he,
the p        r          axis,  r  un
        o ld      in         b            a     g    s
wining
                                          
I am                                       
The     eterna    l         a    nd           
the world     ,  he  ro             and
                             base.        
                                         
I                          f all                  

                    in
               puddles               .       
                                      
I                                    
  e       n                 d

                                           .


VIII. Unmaking

Crystal lies
in splinters, helixing
into puddles
that do not reflect
sunlight, do not
speak, do not
write like severed
hands, inscribing
hieroglyphs
in Georgia clay.

A thousand ants
stumble like syllables
across our broken
soundscapes, unmaking
the bones we cast,
the entrails we scattered,
the chamomile tea
that whispered scorpions
like steam into
our squatting eyes.

Mistletoe chars,
and wind pierces
our wrists. We caress
the granite, and
remember the tides.
We cannot see
through the smoke. We cannot
see the smoke.
We are grateful,
and cannot see.