06-18-2022, 11:47 PM
The long march
of the sun begins in birdsong
into the utter heat
of a 100 degree afternoon.
So much hinges on the word into in you lately. Maybe you could make a staple of the term and its connotations. One of those technical things, like A. R. Ammons does. Or Wallace Stevens and the word enough.
Sun twists day like a licorice stick.
Grass withers,
smell of thirst rising from the earth.
Thirst smells from the earth.
I'm simply playing.
Thirst smells of earth.
On the border
asphalt’s crop of black fever ascends.
Ants dismember
a dead moth down to its wings.
The dead adds specificity. Simply saying a moth down to its wings adds something else.
Blue sky halts
for its hours to gather into fire.
The sun swallows the horizon,
end of day,
Either you could cut end of day, or move it to the next stanza as end of day
exhaustion.
exhaustion spilt into wounded pools of shadow,
triaged by locusts singing into dark.
That would be your only three-line stanza.
The moth wings are gone.
of the sun begins in birdsong
into the utter heat
of a 100 degree afternoon.
So much hinges on the word into in you lately. Maybe you could make a staple of the term and its connotations. One of those technical things, like A. R. Ammons does. Or Wallace Stevens and the word enough.
Sun twists day like a licorice stick.
Grass withers,
smell of thirst rising from the earth.
Thirst smells from the earth.
I'm simply playing.
Thirst smells of earth.
On the border
asphalt’s crop of black fever ascends.
Ants dismember
a dead moth down to its wings.
The dead adds specificity. Simply saying a moth down to its wings adds something else.
Blue sky halts
for its hours to gather into fire.
The sun swallows the horizon,
end of day,
Either you could cut end of day, or move it to the next stanza as end of day
exhaustion.
exhaustion spilt into wounded pools of shadow,
triaged by locusts singing into dark.
That would be your only three-line stanza.
The moth wings are gone.