matryoshka opening deeper
until I can hear your bones
singing into mine,
and feel the moon
as it rolls through you
like a great city before a war
where it has been night for so long
that everyone sees
with their hands,
and then somewhere in the city
a newborn animal
shakes the dust off itself
and stands, makes
a thimbleful of sound,
and a boy standing in the square
turns toward it,
and his father, not knowing
what his hands will be made to do
to other men,
places a hand on his head.
Deep in the forest, where no one has gone,
where rain bloats the black moss and mud,
a deer is rubbing its forelock and antlers
against a tree. The velvet that covers the antlers
unwinds into strips, like bandages.
The rain scratches at the deer’s coat
as if trying to get inside, washes the antlers
of blood, like a curator cleaning the bones
of a saint in the crypt beneath a church
at the end of a century, when the people
have begun to think of the bodies
as truly dead and unraiseable,
when children have begun to carry knives
in their pockets. Once the last shred
of velvet falls to the ground, the deer
bends to eat it, nearly finished with ritual
and altar, the tree’s side stripped of bark
while someplace in the world
a bomb strips away someone’s skin.
The deer’s mouth is stained with berries
of its own blood. Then, the deer is gone
and the tree left opened, the rain darkening
red against the hole in the sapwood.
The storm grows louder and louder
like a fear. The deer will shed
its velvet four more times before dying
of disease; the tree will grow its bark
again. Each atom in each cell will remember
the body it had made in this place, this time,
long after the rain flushes the river
to flood, long after this morning
when the country wakes to another war,
when two people wake in a house
and do not touch each other.
It begins on the brightest
afternoon, my body
held in a corona
I can taste the sugar
and the heat of.
At the edge of the valley
wild hyacinths,
violet ones, scythe
through the shadows,
through my eye.
When I reach the hive
the bees cluster
on my veil like molecules
magnified, a code
to the core of things.
When I lift a comb
one bee stings my wrist,
then another,
the venom a note,
a pulse of light
that rises into a song:
a tower of spikes
or a swaying stalk
of purpling
blossoms. This must be
what love is:
a pain so radiant
it cuts through all others.
As the Sickle Moon Guts a Cloud
a sickness grows inside the moonlight,
turns under the mud in the corral
the horse churns to fever.
A boy stands at the fence
and whistles to the horse, clicks
his tongue, stamps his foot.
The horse will not come.
And when it does,
when the boy offers it hay,
it bites the center of his palm
which purples with blood.
In twenty years, the boy
will place
