The Poetry Marathon

Tomato plants drown in the garden.
I shrug out of my raincoat
and shiver, waiting for the kettle to steam.
Children cry out beyond the kitchen window,
jumping between puddles like drunken frogs,
searching for mason jars in the flood;
the waters continue to rise.

I
Don’t.

II
But, of course, you must.
As we all must.
The Great Eye waits for each
In turn to meet its gaze.

III
The shoggoth whirled in the cosmic winds.
It was all.

IV
A man and a woman
Are none.
A man and a woman and a shoggoth
Are infinite.

V
I do not know what to prefer,
The beauty of chaos
Or the beauty of the Elder Things,
The tentacle suckling
Or just after.

VI
The shadow crosses the stars,
An indecipherable curse
In an ancient tongue: “Tekeli-li!”

VII
Oh men of Sarnath,
Why do you covet golden idols?
Green lights in the mists;
They come to reclaim what’s theirs

VIII
Dreadful, inescapable rhythms;
I know the shoggoth is involved.

IX
When the shoggoth leaves,
Its tentacles inscribe many circles

X
At the sight of ruins,
Impossible geometries
Wrought of ivory unknowably vast,
Even the creatures of Ib
Cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Celephais
In a dream.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook his own shadow
For a shoggoth.

XII
The chaos is crawling.
The shoggoth must be approaching.

XIII
It was evening for a thousand years.
It was raining
And it was going to rain.
The shoggoth sat
In a tangle of limbs.

Ghosts of crows
haunt the apple tree
in your back yard.

It was your backyard
when you were a child.

Now it’s no one’s.
Neither are you.

Horse and Hattock! are their cries
And though by day we beg and barter with our lives
On moonless nights the fair folk come
To tempt the fitful lusts of falsesworn wives.

We pray the church bells banish all their lies
Before they’ve left a killcrop growing deep inside.

The sun contemplates
how it will be remembered.
Shadows lie down the valley slope,
confusing light and dark.
A slice of black wing, just ahead of the wind,
a tantrum of fur, and blood
falls from the sky in fat drops like red
red ink, correcting mistakes written on the earth.
Last light spills down from lost summer
clouds on their way toward the sea,
washes down hills, fringed in brown-gold trees,
drowns over-eager shadows, huddled
beneath churches, their steeples in silhouette,
wearing graveyards like shawls.

The sticky spiral of a galaxy pulls us toward an unknown center.
The sun is a spider, gravity its slow-strung web to snare us.
One only need to look at the moon, wrapped in pale silk, to know our fate.

“Golden Shovel” poem after John Haines’s “The Hermitage”

I am lost in a forest
A tangle of moss crawls below
My feet, an endless stone stair
Up to a waterfall I finally recognize, a secret
It has no name
Mine is carved
Into a nearby dogwood,
my childhood tangled among its roots.

In the hollow of a rock,
unboned of silver long ago,
is a shrine to a terra-cotta skinned girl

Guadeloupe,
she of the Rocky summit;
leave a candle flickering and a flower

descend as hummingbirds
lodge in crooks of Juniper,
cold-blooded things, slow as unwound clocks

As night sidles down hillsides
churchyard shadows and Christ,
tourists rise from wrought-iron benches

Pause for a procession
of Penitentes,
knees raw from the ascent to Santa Prisca

They carry infants
too young to name,
their labored breaths like prayers

I have no map

save paths I’ve walked across your skin,
etched bright with ink,
pressed pink and raw
by slender braids.

I’ve measured up
the contours of your land,
laid carefully my line
like a surveyor.

The bite of the rope
on the tender flesh of your throat,

wound round the rising
watershed of your breasts
like topographic lines
or trails of footsore pilgrims

wandering their paths
toward Jerusalem.

All children are born pagans:
cathedrals concealed within
rhododendron, whispered rites,
copper wine from bare faucets
fresh-cut lawns like lost gardens
drawing water from wells drilled
deep into ancient hills,
filtered through sieves of rock
deep as memory, roadside where
the family dog was raptured,
ponds flush with bullfrogs growling
heathen prayers beyond all thoughts
or cares for their salvation.