Knowledge

In a fever dream, black dooms descending

He lies rapt in stupor.
The windows tilt from his halo, the dry
heat ticking, each death rattle measures light into
reflections- form a periscope. One eye is all
that is needed to see. People

stutter along streets, gloom draped. Voices
soften and stretch, heard through memory and dreaming-
one hundred shadowy watchers meld to tarmac. Only one enters.

Yard lights convulse, scald twilit moments, birds
settling on flares. He blinks,
old as time- skin a coral of waxes, leather from his own glow. Eyes,
molten yolks still glimmer beneath lids, fat sunken. She watches,

notes of orange blossom form
a noose: all her palettes collide. She mothers
all earth- cannot . A beginning with no end, future, past.
Roots run transatlantic, languages bud- tiredness. Immortal,
he doesn't breathe.

He wakes to light dappled through glass and birch.

-

He was the oldest and the first,
his house heavy with rotting decades. TV
translated static into prayers, sun-bleached spines
bled stories. Paisley throne, cigarette smoke
caroling glory to ceiling fans. Time

was his only child, tiredness his only poison: peeling
junk mail, the musk of winter, slowing pulse, ice gilded
ripples, carpets moldering damp, age lined china moons. The

saddest fever lost its sting. Sleep, she
bathed him, mother again. Strained sobbing to a
wheeze, sang all the flashing incandescence of star-dew
to a lantern blush, golden voice coaxed identity into the
omnipresent.

-

From her earth came a city,
it ripened in the light and split the air,
it sheared the soil and rooted in her belly.
-
The vines creep over the city.
-
In the dark, light lamps from her palms.
This is where she held her secrets, and her power- in olive eyes. To

her youngest she passed
a fizz of sound, but never
spoke.  A promise.

It rattled in the wind's verdict.