in the heart
at a hundred paces,”
he says, words blows from axes.
“Your heart’s mine,” he later says.
The cold, North wind slaps down the sedge,
hurtling through the valley
through tangled, thorny vine and rocky gully.
The mountains are impregnable walls
capped in snow, opposite to the deepest wells
the world has ever known.
His enemie’s remains are bone.
His mother is a crone,
one petrified not by time
but by not even being allowed pantomime.
Her secrets will be held forever
until her own bones rest under alder
side-by-side with her noxious husband.
I don’t want to die here, christened
by bruises as I leap into the abyss
nothing amiss
except his anger
until the ice turns to water in springtime, a child’s bladder
letting loose warmth onto yellow bedstraw
as if the dead foliage could rise with the thaw.
I will not move from this stone;
I will not bond with the waterfall’s rhinestone
glitter, nor splatter the gallstone
rocks below.
This stone will not be called lover’s leap--I have no beau
to show for my dissatisfaction.
Nothing won.
Only the caw of the crows, the only bird left
after Hel’s theft.
I cannot stay.
I cannot leave.
I pray
for the visiting khedive
to see my pondering
and see the aching;
for him to sweep me away,
to abduct
as men do.
I could bid my husband adieu,
a knife a corkscrew
in his neck.
I would be on a quarterdeck
where the moon causes a tide
before his human spaniels left his side.
But I am not a seductress,
so coitus
is imagining his carcass.
Flawless deadness: fungus-covered,
eyeless, gauntness, and foulness.
Discolored, disfigured, and rapiered.
A gift for this place’s only fauna:
the blackbird.
Guilty, I wish for wisteria or witches’ thimbles, for toxic flora,
but the only green is lichen in the orchard.
I am lost.
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