Light Around the Body

The light around the body is the storm or stillness of the heart

Are you the desert winds blinding?

The devil's staircase winding?

Squandering your darlings

While the Orion, with his watchful eye, hangs upside down

The light around the body is choking on eucalyptus and rose

The velvet hand milks the deer

Queer lake is on fire

Where the highway meets the highway scum

You swoon at the seal of Solomon

The light around the body is the larch turn it’s yellow face to the sun

A people stare down the barrel of a gun

After the fault lines of the earth have come undone

And the red gums bleed in the valley of the giants

The angels in the mountain ash have turned their backs

As if waking from a dream

The pleasure fades as the morning breaks

The solstice has come and gone again

And again we haven’t learned anything

We’re the sap that flows in the spring like gold

So down sugar mountain we go