ETRUSCAN FRAGMENTS

The obscure red corpse of the wine

breathes sleeping in dark, cool bottles,

dreaming of the sunlight on the vines

kissing the fat, sweet grape.

*

Agony pools, cooling in the scar,

searing sight screwed into two balls

of tormenting vision, ripening in

the golden cataracts of the sun.

*

Into the vacuum of the air,

the rim of the world where corkscrew vertigo

of space is Nature’s adamant rebuke

that all things die eventually.

*

The shining pebbles of the sun:

from shadow to sunlight is a knife edge.

Suicides hide in the wood.

*

This is a cooling planet,

it yet grows cold.

Men outlast gods, they cool.

In turn, we cool –

the planet outlasts us all.

*

The dove is the bird of Love,

it doesn’t come to flutter

around the goddess and coo,

it comes to roost and brood.

*

Infinitude:

the oil-bright upper zone

bounds the fringe of trees

(there are no straight lines in Nature)

severing the hemispheres.

*

What haruspices

from the semantic bowels

of poetry?

*

The religion of compass

knows one thing

exists outside of it

and not: Oblivion.

An earlier version was published in Poetry NZ 20 in 2000.