Larva
Tuesday, February 23, 2016 - 6:15pm
It’s the first snow of a new year
where nothing is new, and everything
wants to lug
its turgid body into the flour
sack of quietude. Even the landscape unfurls
its fur like the back of a white
buffalo. Some child’s red
balloon seized by the speartip of a mountain
ash, a bird heart quivering in the center
of a coma. And the scare
-crow, strung up on a broomstick, bears
the weight of his humiliation
on his straw mind where
winter falls upon a ryefield, and the owlet sings a
plain song of despair, its notes –
gurgling water in a mouth
made out of blue cloth, the same gauze
the silkworms once
spun to fashion
a robe for an emperor, whose men and
women prostrated before his palace, his servants
swarming around his ivory
throne like botflies
around a bull’s flank. The empress wore
her face like a carnival, her loneliness
so extravagant. She patted
the blue-lipped baby
in her lap the way she
stroked her husband’s pride. There’s a lot
to desire in this life. But not
these pale colonnades, or a woman’s
shriek piercing the night
like the light from a kerosene lamp. She
stared into her garden
and saw two geese atop the frozen
fountain, still as weathervanes,
huddling around a silver
egg, that nascent eye, that luminous
larva spoiled with love
given freely. The wolf
-white world just
shrugs, bats
its infant eyelashes
and goes on to dream
another stillbirth.