i.

Running through the forest whipping
the hawks before him, his last handsome

days engaged his risen hands at last. Before
all else they flew, no longer thumbing stones

or flinging shells of cloven shapes, but limbs
and sky, chasing crashed blacknesses deeper

than hides once stretched across trails, hung
between doorways of sleep and buoyancy.

The fatigues of his spirit unhindered, his steps,
if they could be called such, channeled ancients

of immediacy. For what is there to be learned
from the snakes in one's path? Even leapt

they are lifeless, eyes deadened white, coiled
in cruelty's compact. Better to fly best one can

across lands immune to fleshy divides. Cast them
aside and trace the flares between Tree and Night's

Other—flog their wings with whips hand-flayed
from old grief cats found walking in the rain.

                            ii.

Fast moving, galloping fierce under trees'
ghost-like make of hot-breath abundance,

his hands now touched the trembling canvas
colors sprayed like a thousand thousand mice

flying through the air. As he shook, the valleys
laughed and presented pictures of solitude open

to the staring slip-slip eyes. Slaying amongst
themselves that which was, the battle begat. Life—

eternally fixed above him—could not be recovered,
though he walked upon the back of the wide fish

in the dark silence, in the heat, knowing to do so
was essential, for behind him his darkest features,

rigid above squalor, flat under rain's glass-encrusteds,
smiled as he, the perfect metal, no longer captive

of the sacrificial tissues and griefs of this artificial
horse-hoof gallop, strode the dark wood down.

                            iii.

Juggling blood and fire beneath the stars of Egypt,
imagining himself at least one among the hawks

scarred with deep clickings like fox feet on glass,
there wasn't a moon, that emergent Earth Child

on which God's Occasional Fist compounds our salts,
allowed to intervene. It's good to have wounds upon

one's eyes within a mercury'd mirror—to see the easy
fit of the hand that feeds into the hand that kills to finish

this crime conceived in a world suspended between
feet and sky, for even bad eyes can see the dying leaves—

especially bad eyes—see their mindless forms mindlessly
flowing. Anything raced is more nimble! he roared

as autumn's black ganglions spread against grey,
and sped on into the night.

__

This work originated years ago as this three-line poem:

HIS LAST HANDSOME DAYS

Spent running through the forest,
          whipping the hawks
     before him.

and then it called to me, tugged on my sleeve, nagged me until I gave in and listened to it over the course of a long, cold winter as it gave birth to itself through many, many incarnations.