#what this is your guess as good as mine
How many lives do you have left?
If a road is a vein then catacombs are arteries, sunk deep to protect some secret, vital blood. Close-air mortuaries. Granaries. Vast aqueducts.
Places lovers can touch and proof their love.
The channels running under this town — under your bare feet naked with after, after, a smouldering still wafting off you, bed-passions or an itch of the soles which like your death keeps saying go, go— don’t parallel any known road. They vivisect the wheatfield, snake through the tangled root of the hill and coil northeastward, as far perhaps as the Meridians. A thief-road, maybe. Remnant of those iron days when gold and grain and people had to be stolen back into the kingdom.
Or maybe there’s a God to it, in it, that green blood under blood — wandering about without his head, gore of the cut neck set aflame. As for me I keep talking in phosphorus: God of the brass sun, God with zinc hands. Green on dead green.
If he’s burning I’m burning above him. Trying to put myself out with rugs of heavy wool and only making summer.
How many lives do you have left?
How many do you? No future to any of us and precious little present. This maybe why I keep so well to darklands, ago,before,then. Why I’m four years pregnant with the severed hands of Gebeleizis.
How many lives do I have left. How many seconds. Each eyelash, dust-mote, each infinite and precious.
In the field, in the fire, I’m singing.
