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Trees Show Their Rings, Animals Their Veins
“For the artist, can there be a more secretive idea than how nature is reflected in an animal’s eye?” —Franz Marc (Damaged during war - Repaired by Paul Klee)
Is there a length of light or breath
with shadows strong enough to resist
the ironies of fire and its consort night?
To capture or be shattered irresolutely?
To deepen, to darken
what the treeless landscape
allows outside its misery?
And which brown hue
best conceals the uneasy truth:
light erases all? No images
resurrected as words
can ease the weight
from this abattoir of broken
burdened earth.
At some point color offers
cold comfort and no longer
reflects what I have
always known as deer
or horse, fox or dog.
I am stretched beyond belief
and unprepared
to become the unloved sun.
Wind’s labored curse
ignores the copse of lindens
where a red deer grazes
on what will soon become
the moon’s yellow face.
What remains to be sacrificed
is the house of reason.
An albino kestrel ignites
against the blue sky
in its search this season
for a mate, or a companion
whose death in windows of daylight
won’t be diminished
by shards of life.
What remains
are open veins, wounds
aching with belief
but draining in a gauze of scars. |
