Alchemisland

Seven pillars upright the temple

Inside a man

Angels gladly redoubt thereto

Gilding it for God

Banners billowing constant

No feast unwined, all rests observed

Gifts: tongues, scents, gold of a form

Wisdoms seven magics five, extol the man

Sephirah of the bridged stars

Leading us to which Destiny

Abundant the earthly forms

Violent and passionate, in like manner 

Everything upon the Earth

Projection of inner sight

Competition a simian reflection

Harmonic, bountiful conflict of change

Dwindling fruits on diamond fronds

Falling in their time

Sand grain nights passing in seconds

It seems

Red evenings like beads

On the abacus to oblivion

Baked boots regain store fresh rigidity

Sapping heat to flank sticks like a handprint, horse and rider

Cactus glade, grimness of faint recognition

Widdershins, withered shins miserable in the hot stirrup

Boiling solar syrup, heavy hats come off with uprighting hair

Like pitch caps

Honey of Apollo, heated to inesculence

Zagging trails, dizzying as Viscount Tredegar’s stories

Teasing wet of dripping sun

Loons adrift at sea resort to drinking brine

Never was one wretched enough to swallow sand

An indigent in a rainbow poncho told them

Thirty three dead kings are buried hereabout

Do not disturb their gold crammed resting places

Marked by corn husk mounds

With a satchel full of war bonds

Journeying to Washington to cash them at the capital bank

His wife absconded with his best friend

Such can happen he says

Modern times are titillating, much excitation

Coming from this desert, imagine riding to Babylon

For the first time

They gain high ground and vantage, looking out

Shells of huts marked out like rockeries

Remnant of past glory perhaps

Foundation of future wonder, doubt

As dust we line the outer belts

Make beds for future ocean depths

To my wife, my second best bed

To the earth, myself as bed

Up late with the fox

Floundering fire gutters out

Placeless sounds, some borne in the mind

Worded winds sweep the night

Bringing coded dreams

Coyote airs filling empty space

Night like a painting’s undercoat, vast matte

Morning arose

Desert rose busy with polka dot wasp moth caterpillars

Desert rose upon itself, dunes mounding and collapsing

Sand its own Samson

Descent down steep bluffs spurs dustclouds

Into the Land of the Scorpioness

Coyote eyes vivid, glowing geminis

Like floating campfires

Recede with the light’s procession

Progression today ultimate prerogative

Last night archangel’s namesake drunk enough to jig 

On the precarious pit lip, plunging to Tartarus

Saved by invisible hand, today rides rum saddened

Ahorse with head lolling like an arrow struck

Brutish and whittled down to ambition alone

Arts prevail still among them, at nights and at stops

Verse written hastily in pencil, with only the holding hand as lectern

June fourteenth someone has headed a page with and written nothing else

Blooming desert flowers, same later writes, and deserted followers

Imagines Iberians in dented plate wielding cumbersome single shot rifles

Loathing every second of it

Why are we here, God

No surprise they killed everybody

Sand preserves shed skin of old crimes like a Cain

Passers by gaze upon moldering ruins

Temples never unsanctified reduced to quarries

Mortuary stillness, a place of transgression

Know what happened here, you

Sympathy none for living man, less for ghosts

Spitting as they pass, silencing spooked destriers

Michael relieving himself thinking of further verse

Stops mid stre

Sound indefinite unmistakable; kinless to accustomed sounds 

Howling an axeman leaps forth, shrieking Grendel

Raven hair tucked to his tunic

Braid ends at his waist, priest’s plaited cincture

Three movements third a thudding fall

No cushioning palms regard his crown

Hits hard

Blood hot on the poet’s face

Delighting down his revolver barrel

Wonders would an old Spanish rifle discharge in that time

Kisses its barrel, disregards its heat

What steam still issues forth inhales

Imbibing soul of haunted gun

Need to urinate vanishes

Returns, tells nobody, writes some

Remembers often the man he opened

His eyes, thief sun takes their moisture

Body is gone, never got a great look but thinks it was a Commanche brave

Information he is compelled by martial oath to impart

Reportage of incident, first factual for the records

The Captain nodding commends and stars him

One yellow knot allowed to his bridle

Fanciful fireside versions he finds new even to himself, funny fictions

Growing in the telling

“He cem at me bawling

Ducked two tommyhawks and shot a third’n from the air with a great twang

A shard caught im and when e flinched i shot im through and he fill did

Big mean bruiser this feller, incha hair fer evey man he kilt”

Sand flats firm but fixless

Denied object permanence

Mind craving definite angles

Wading into spreading yellow sea of unknown depth

Cactus milk as shaving balm, soap, water, hair lacquer, suncream, unguent

Distant ochre canyons, their exhausting sight and interminable flight thereto

Things with stingers, webbed sylph to hotrock clings

Stingers poised with poison glint

Malicious eyes malintent

At thirst’s hopeless apex

Which even Pandora’s Box stored 

Hopelessly plunging on

When Commances rode down on them, hollering

Outgrabing even moam raths

Vorpal circling, whorling equine blur hippomania

Fierce horses with Diomedan appetites

Masterly riders in paleolithic symbioses with their mounts

Side and below saddle, bow legged and armed with bows

Equines contiguously alien, rangeless plains until Spaniards came

Afterwards, frisking the dead and combing the loot

Perusing wares, seeing their craft, like prelates

One brave drunk on rutting

Knocks out a horse with one Hippolyta.

Michael, Man Who Rode The Boat Ashore, wakes screaming

Rose of freezing fire rising from the Sun’s crown

Shadows at their stateliest, birthstone beaming down

The Sun rose

World’s virile component

Golden and logical, reason’s proponent

Night’s opponent, dawn is atonement 

Until the last one

Wolf night grey snow splintering shields, deponed in Sagas

First dreamt in volcanic minds, flowering

Garden of foliate magma, igneous fronds

They: grabbing hats dipping lowering peaks wincing at glory

Chiding its strength demand false humility

Silent rebuke slow sapping of strength

Riding bowed, crooked with lolling heads like animate hangedmen

Except him, him staring at it

Cones enthralled by fire

Seduced by wanton scarlet, fire of the eye and mind

Crossed fingers forming an X

Solar disc contained in his eye

About Jones what to say

Short of word warrior, awkward

Except in combat

Could only fly in a storm

Bored when I am not actively dying

Neurasthania, induced by terminal boredom

Wide narrow unchanging unchanging

Changing unchaining reclaiming declaiming proclaiming 

Before leaving Dublin, Jones’ lipsed Black Madonna’s foot 

Off Aungier Street;

A gold pendant of an Ankh

Worn as a ward

Vast dramatic western landscape

Alike where Nephilim courted

Alike where commandments found

All frontiers alike

Animal life abundant 

Distant herd sound

Millipidenous thundering of hooves

As if thereby Wotan astride Sleipnir hunted wildly

Owls taking stock, talons unbothered by cactus spikes

A lizard or an insect lancet shaped skates lightly

Not a grain stirs

Out here, strange circumstantial chimeras

Mutants made by the creativity of a primal instinct

Plated mammals, everything oviparous

Desert Saturn, lunching at the nursery

Brunching at the font

Supping in the chargehouse yard, where running is prohibited

Wayening moon

Whinnying mares

Cowboys in carriage, tightly formed

Lancing through what they call

The terrain in mapless hapless vagabondage

Maps primarily economic in function

Useless in the valleys

Month until Comanche moon

Before them swoon inducing heat

The ground swirling with heat, like gas

Before them looms what once was a great kingdom

Now a tomb