Eagle

Big wings dawns dark.
The sun is hunting.
Thunder collects, under granite eyebrows.

The horizons are ravenous.
The dark mountain has an electric eye.
The sun lowers its meat-hook.

His spread fingers measure a heaven, then a heaven.
His ancestors worship only him
And his children’s children cry to him alone.

His trapeze is a continent.
The sun is looking for fuel
With the gaze of a guillotine.

And already the white hare crouches at the sacrifice,
Already the fawn stumbles to offer itself up
And the wolf-cub weeps to be chosen.

The huddle-shawled lightning-faced warrior
Stamps his shaggy-trousered dance
On an altar of blood.

Low Water

       This evening
The river is a beautiful idle woman.

The day’s August burn-out has distilled
A heady sundowner.
She lies back. She is tipsy and bored.

She lolls on her deep couch. And a long thigh
Lifts from the flash of her silks.

Adoring trees, kneeling, ogreish eunuchs
Comb out her spread hair, massage her fingers.

She stretches – and an ecstasy tightens
Over her skin, and deep in her gold body

Thrills spasm and dissolve. She drowses.

Her half-dreams lift out of her, light-minded
Love-pact suicides. Copulation and death.

She stirs her love-potion – ooze of balsam
Thickened with fish-mucous and algae.

You stand under leaves, your feet in shallows.
She eyes you steadily from the beginning of the world.

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