Stephen Edgar

Sprawling like some small group of picnickers, They're propped among the shadows of the trees, Though one seems drunk, spread-eagled. Nothing stirs Except the flies that clog their cavities. A red cleft rules the parting of that head. You stretch a little and slide out of bed. Acres of debris are in sodden flood About the ruined village, which concedes In blackened matchwood to the tide of mud Its smoking households. Rising from the weeds, Arms reach up stiffly, as for an embrace. Out of the mirror you observe your face While sunlight offers all that you desire. The Aztecs, to appease your counterparts, Would hook still-living bodies from the fire, Hack out and hold aloft the pulsing hearts, Drenching the steps with blood, so they might give Those idle brutes each day a day to live. You have today. Stark-eyed and hollow-faced, Her rigid ribcage almost bursting through The skin, a girl sits in a land laid waste And stares out blankly. So then, it is you— The thought had not occurred to you before— It's you, Huitzilopochtli, God of War.

The jungle, from the floor to the canopy, Clogs and entwines Its every rung and level with rank growth. The python dines Among an epiphytic gaudery And hungry vines. On the mizzled hair of the two-toed sloth Moss has designs. Yet all that climbing tonnage is content-free. The top limbs sway as though to write in air, But can’t remember what they scribble there. Through the savanna’s heat-glaze the herds pause, Ripple and shiver, Or graze hypnotically, or drop their young, Which may deliver Their wet thin steps into the lion’s jaws. By pool or river They stoop at evening side by side among The surface quiver Of their reflexions as the light withdraws: A fable set down in invisible ink; They print their shadows on the pool they drink. Even the perfect pictures in the shale’s Slow-motion traps, The filamentous feathers, which one or two Sharp hammer taps Release, the fish in their meticulous scales, The precise maps Of leaves, did not direct this rendezvous. They’re simply gaps In time, and have no part in these details. The weird wiwaxias, worms and arthropods Were empty of intention as stone gods. Once, though, a figure had the thought to crawl Out of the day Into a cave’s dark reach, its first invoker, And there to splay His hand against the tallow-glimmered wall, And pause to spray His mouth’s cargo of spittle and red ochre On the array Of his five fingers, clear, indelible: Author and content of the space displayed, The maker’s hand becoming what it made.

Mauve mist-shadow cloaks the sky’s River-blurred, inchoate border. Dawn’s old story; and light tries— Not the last time—to devise Lasting order; From first principles assigns Laws to frame day’s jurisdiction; Drawing contours, shapes, and lines From the nebula, it shines, Strange as fiction. Such designs, though, won’t appear In the plans of a committee. Look. The moon’s pale-copper sphere Rings—a gong too faint to hear— Through the city. Let them linger, unawake. Down the mountain’s wrinkled brilliance Darkness empties like a lake. Minted gold, house windows make Coins worth millions. Both in disbelief and pride All the buildings in the distance On the river’s farther side Take up, as the shadows slide, New existence. Shadow slides along the roof, Past the guttering and gable, Shrinks, and leaves the house aloof Where the light reads out its proof Like a fable.

In siftings of chromatic sediment Shed by the winter hours as they decay, With slow descent Light settles through the lower sky in peach, Then mauve, then pale self-abnegating gray Against the water, now that day is spent At Bennetts Beach, Under the high withdrawing blueness, band On band, like layers in a decorative Bottle of sand, Enclosed beneath the heavens’ dome, as though This were the perfect realm in which to live, Preserved, unburdened by the least demand, Or wish, to know— And simply be. Along the beach convene Some silver gulls which stand around reflecting Upon the sheen That comes and goes about their scarlet feet, And crested terns fly back and forth inspecting The shallows for a last titbit to glean, And lightly treat A two-faced wind that works its way across The metal of the sea it tries to planish And to emboss, While deep in its unbalanced buffetings Gannets alternately appear and vanish, Plunge, rise, and loft and give their heads a toss. These things, these things