lll

now everything has eyes
now everything is ice
now everything has teeth

small uncertain cracks

things with no names
creep from beneath the mineral blocks

like a species
not yet invented

mica-eyes
flakes,
nothing has been here

*
no earth for this conversation
no gravity
no language for it

deep in the earth
a thinking starts,
a muscle begins to dream

a scarlet trickle forms
a form of pain leaks out
& tightens

I must not lose my footing
here among the stones,
this crossing
hazardous as bones,
treacherous as eyes

a thin muscle of water
curls & grips my calf,
silent, unbending

*



*

here trees long slow deaths
here words are sparse as jewels
here small trees crack & writhe
in pain at this high altitude

frost granulates on the shrubbery,
a skin of snow

the agony of lichens, something
twisted,
wrung from the air,
made life-like,
as if the sky had bled

*

eskers now
& drumlins
& scoured precambrian rock,
the cruel glacial fingers

ice inhales its age
like slabs of breath drawn back
into the lungs of arctic north

a cold magnetic light,
hurting

*

meat upon meat
on the granite face,
a snarling
with fangs
with clubs

locking
sheer as cliffs,
a knife-edge
breaking skin

a hide scraped raw
a frozen carcass

lumps of crystal
blood-in-the-snow

makes an eery sound

*

sawtooth range
jaws of the continental drift,
trees dusting over
like gauze,
snow drifting up
into lips

scar tissue

the dimension bares its cutting edge
like a mouth with no word,
a hand erupting hugely
out of a canvas

*

holding the land
in a grasp of water
the continent
divides

like birth
all things
twinned

the creeks
gush upwards
& downwards

the oceans
pools of gravity
hold the sky