Jellyfish
wilder, v.
arch.
1. a. trans. To cause to lose one’s way, as in a wild or unknown place; to lead or drive astray; refl. to lose one’s way, go astray.
3. trans. and intr. To render, or become, wild or uncivilized. Obs. rare.
WILDER
DESCENT
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good
W.H. AUDEN
whose eyes have never really opened;
who were born with bitter seeds sewn
beneath our eyelids;
whose eye bulbs glow red when salted;
whose sockets grow tall bitter stalks
that sprout small bitter buds
that crawl with aphids;
whose faces are wild fields, and fruitless;
whose throats are peeled peaches, and voiceless;
who collect eyeballs like marbles
and shoot them around a dirt circle;
who drag sickles across each other’s skulls
and leave wet symbols
we copy onto paper—tales of ancient children
who vanished in a flood,
who stumbled from the spring,
who hid inside a haunted wood
to save themselves from drowning.
The ocean calls.
we
cross
six trillion miles of
everlasting night
we
are precious
tendrils of light.
We
may be a sun to someone.
Why should we
be
utterly lost
ADVENT
In the first month of the year
birds curdled the air.
From our windows we watched them
clench and billow, their wings beating
so low to the ground that seeds rose
from their furrows.
When our ears began to ache from the pressure,
we sent out our augurs.
A great fire, they said,
is blowing from the east.
This explained the fevers, the mercury
that broke the levees of our mouths,
the apples that dimpled and rotted
in our orchards, dropping through the leaves
like heart-sized hailstones.
Behind our windows, we waited for the fire to turn
even as we watched the horizon
go red from edge to edge.
Every morning new packs of animals fled
through
