Past Curfew

Past Curfew

Between the Divje Babe Flute and the Jordan

I.

We bend our breath to calling
through the hollow of the limb.
Your marrow haunts the middle
clawing deeper in.

The sockets of the midden
star the Night within,
each finger down
in femured sound
what once-was-wall goes thin

We bore into the thigh bone
in dream, the schemas slurred
under fur, beneath the fury
swam the timbre of a bird.

We birth our words in lowing
the tangle of us sings,
the voweling of the distance,
clawing back toward kin.

The sockets of the midden
stare into the song
of the passage through the bear,
of bones that once belonged

together, of holes along a line.
Of wild whistling into want,
of whippur-word. Of sign.

II.

They say
one morning
G-d, thumbed
and upright
came to be bathed,
water before sap
River before Myrhh.
And G-d also came, all Bird
still hovering as She will,
watching over all, her own.
There was blessing and birthright,
feather to hipsocket,
an elseway left behind.

III.


Last night, standing at the door
between that river and this sea
the now-gone-dark
yawed through the mouth of a gull.

The sky went red
and all the upright briefly bowed
as if in the shadow of a body looking
to be finally bedded in hiphold
of the mounds passsing
as what we name the World.

I heard Esau, his blood now on the doorposts
of Jerusalem, cry to Jacob as a sibling
of home coming and murder.
Whose hand had clutched whose ankle
became the fire in the forge
as ploughsteel veined to sword.
Every open place at every table
was reserved for fear and the stranger
along with any angel left
was driven on.

In the pause between hammer strokes,
we heard our sediments,
their word sent back to dry land:
Salt to lip, blowhole breathe!
Here has come down by speartip
a blood abiding forever.
Kreatur, G-d is gone to ground.

And us, too, come down.
And from that bow,
oarlock rattling
there I saw the Deer,
heard her breathe easy
and red run back to blue
counting down
the clearings
from horn to hoof
before circling into lichen,
sweet fern and star flower.

Now, She was awake.
Wide enough to dream 
into forests unmanned.

Here, in the saved night.
Here, in the lush grass,
a lion among lambs,
She came to Wolf.

Last night, standing at the door
I saw the Messiah.

As a shudder teased her haunch,
she reveled
in the whisper and chur, 
keeping faith between tooth and tine.

She barely stirred when the boy brushed through the aspens,
set his things down at the roots and came into the middle
to curl up by her side.

He too, afield in this night,
again between river and myrhh,
shivered as he longed for howl.

At the end of all things
is a place flush with people.
When G-d was boy, was a man,
was a She was a bird
after loving and bleeding
this is where They set sail for.

At the end of each world
and the beginning
was the earth.