One by one appear the luminary pills
that flaw the blank black provinces of space.
Here lies my madder self, my nettled self,
spanning barbed goat grass, catchweed.
I might have assumed shearlings huddled
at the land’s broad flexion. I might have expected
some creature to adhere in kind, to straddle
its mate, not for all the closeness of the moor,
but that it open, beyond one soul’s duration.
& counted upon, certainly, the ambient gleam
of encroaching hamlets, now that their grainy noise
imprints the nerves of any living thing.
The self is such a bore with what it knows.
And maddening what a body can allow.
The weather has changed little,
but it has changed irrevocably.
Come, crude sun, and I will avert my gaze.
Hurl me over your shoulder.
Strewn dag. Cracked feed. Little lamb.