Joseph Spece

Exalted life this not because you know slavish attention or sit bathed in the royal jellies and rarer distillates nor because it commences backlit all by droning buzz and the mellow scent of lilac but for your ignorance of desire for your cloistering, Liege Never wondering what tastes abound in distant clusters so rich is your interior your fecundity your multiple dark imaginings Never saying as I do Why and again Why Never saying as I do to the world of surrounding combs Do you think I may someday escape

Struck a pair of stones to start off. Left behind ten men curled like scythes round the fire. Left behind the bracing moon. Passed a pack of ibex, passed the mammoth. Left the carious canines before the rath, left the scapula— freed space for petal dyes, for fixatives. Passed (in a dream)

Woke in the brume, lilacs like turf stars. The late fawn standing in his syrups; bucks down the swale chewing sedge. We move south to slopes of sleeping poppy, past the white alder, bending heads to scent of calx—in natural dark a man tries his hand at belonging. He with greave of hide, a born hood, lay with three spikes in the clay, green peak in the breeze. He whose breathing wrongs the still. You stir now to mend, to redress? To be one of us, after all this?