a creature who spoke the only language it knew.
In Praise of the Village Idiot
Torrents of sun from mica on the hedges,
the quartz driveways framed in avocados.
Babuleo and his anklebells long overdue.
Rumour has him in a new shirt, a jungle green.
Rumour has him radiant.
It will not last, for he’s not what we want him to be.
He spies through windows, eats our garbage,
his testes dangling from torn shorts.
Someone’s sure to get him new ones
because they can’t handle his immodesty,
his seeming carelessness.
They don’t realize he knows no other way.
He sucks clay because it tastes good,
a saltiness he’s found nothing better than.
And his garbage meals shuck their ferment
to his delight—all tasting like gifts.
His anklebells sound his coming
and kids badger him where he goes.
He seethes and curses them,
their elusive ridicule, their cruel normality.
His gibberish is a longing, a palpable desire.
That he could speak such words,
find the right invective, some sweet slang.
Desire that he could just talk.
Then there are days—today perhaps—
when he finds a voice and sings,
a hollow rasping where his face speaks beauty,
blissful repose—a truce.
He makes fluent sense, a soulful parlance,
like Beethoven to his own deaf ear,
as though he’s always spoken perfectly,
never said anything else, as though he, even now,
was just wondering: Did I make music today?
The Volcanologist’s Lament
Living things know the sound of their hour.
The stormchaser knows the wind calling,
the eye’s silence before the hammerfall.
For the hellfighter, the sudden company
of fire, oil turned to tongues that lick the dust
with flame. For rockhounds the earth’s
seismic bitchings, stones tumbling from Earth’s
molten bruise. In all our hours
can one find more haunting a thrall than the dust
and shockwall closing over those calling
for help? Such images inevitably accompany
us into the grave: the fall
of lavasilk, magma’s chaotic freefall
through the sky’s strata to reclaim the earth.
A nightly pillar of fire to accompany
us, a pillar of cloud by day—what ashen hour
could pass without some stony lord calling
gravely from the depths? This sweet dust.
They say we are raised from dust.
The honey-heft of all the fruit fallen
in the orchards, the soil calling
commands of ferment and rot, the earth
reclaiming all. Everything is the hour
of his supper. We are his company,
his very wine and bread. We are a company
of fools for mistaking the holiness of dust.
Land, property, certainly. Not an hour
of these passes unbartered in the rise and fall
of markets and monies, but the earth
goes unheard. That lithic heart calling
its pulse up through the plates, calling
its wrath through the faults: I keep company
with gods, why do you not listen? This earth
is such a terrible loneliness. Built of dust,
they say. I’m just a man, bound to fall.
Why care without another to share the hours?
O firestone, I’ve unearthed nothing. O enemy hour,
when comes calling my friend in the fall,
my company into the country of dust?
The Volcanologist’s Lament II
From the distress of the undressed—
unbedded rocks, tripped-over tree limbs—
scurrisome bugs and so-many-legged pedes
unhomed: life is in the running fight,
that telltale scatter of things driven to endure.
We all know the reaper’s come-hither claw wag.
Without cipher, the flourish and thrall offers so little,
yet faced with lavasilk on the slopes, we stare.
What has the flame to offer?
Survival is luck and love of oneself,
timing, smarts, a pinch of learned-the-hard-way.
Lava can warm you with the heat of all it has burned.
What it gives, it has taken.
Rainmaker
They called you in their need,
none believing in your ricketed
legs and bird bones, the desiccated
eagle head you carried.
You shook your lion-tail sceptre
at their quiet ridicule,
strutted your beads and spat the dark fuel
of your prayers into the fire.
After the thunder and cloudgrace,
were they tears on weathered faces
laughing their thanks? Did they
ever believe in you rainmaker—
or was it enough they cried, Asante!
Asante! and drank the water?
How to Be Eaten by a Lion
for Claire Davis
If you hear the rush, the swish of mottled sand
and dust kicked up under the striving paws,
its cessation, falling into the sharp and brittle grass
like the tick of a tin roof under sun
or hint of rain that nightly wakes you,
try to stand your ground. Try not to scream,
for it devalues you. That tawny head and burled
mange, the flattened ears of its sleek engine
will