The poem
A life hauls itself uphill through hoar-mist steaming the sun's tongue licking leaf upon leaf into stricken liquid When? When? cry the soothseekers but time is a bloodshot eye seeing its last of beauty its own foreclosure a bloodshot mind finding itself unspeakable What is the last thought? Now I will let you know? or, Now I know? (porridge of skull-splinters, brain tissue mouth and throat membrane, cranial fluid)
Shattered head on the breast of a wooded hill Laid down there endlessly so tendrils soaked into matted compose became a root torqued over the faint springhead groin whence illegible matter leaches: worm-borings, spurts of silt volumes of sporic changes hair long blown into far follicles blasted into a chosen place
Revenge on the head (genitals, breast, untouched) revenge on the mouth packed with its inarticulate confessions revenge on the eyes green-gray and restless revenge on the big and searching lips the tender tongue revenge on the sensual, on the nose the carrier of history revenge on the life devoured in another incineration
You can walk by such a place, the earth is made of them where the stretched tissue of a field or woods is humid with beloved matter the soothseekers have withdrawn you feel no ghost, only a sporic chorus when that place utters its worn sigh let us have peace
And the shattered head answers back
And I believed I was loved, I believed I loved Who did this to us?