A Hundred Hands

The temperate bone-gray sky reclines, clinging
To the atmosphere, a hundred hands of it,
Inaudible white wind that in it singing
Comes dressed to the lighthoused shore and leans above it,
The blue tipped ears of wolves that prey to prove it.

Yet I don’t envy them. Their freedom from my way.
The flea-bitten lupus in their society.
At half dark, gathering on the highway,
Yipping at flashes of the desiderati
Strung between the white lines; their piety

Ingenuous, in a bald word or two,
Stone blind as the stolid, unremarkable sky,
Demesne of plants uprooted by the Duke of Chou.
KaChing! they say the changes are thick or sly.
And the Duke’s men are all left out to dry.

A hundred hands wringing the mazy felt,
Seeing with thin fingers the white song
Blow. Ears dear to the blunt horns of moonspalt
Come down in a battish swoop beside the long
Sip of the sea, and sizzle like a gong.

Eight miles from the shore the arbor’s hush,
Sub-sonic beeps, the whelps on airs emboss.
Ghostdogs tracking town make squat in the bush.
Return quickly to me, my love, this dross,
These sobs, these implements consigned to my use.