Some of a mind might say she’d consumed him. It started
with small gifts:
seed pods lifted in secluded apses,
a nautilus wound in column to the rafters.
Thus fed, her mineral womb laced round rosewood breast
and grew. Spanish moss twined in limestone and spread,
bloomed in the granite canopy -
years, subsumed in this organic crust, watched
her limbs unravel, root in wet flesh
and, in time, release his own bone,
his own blood into the stone.
He stroked, caressed its rosary mesh, still breathing
the beating heart of basalt throned beneath him
for years he gave his body,
gave nearly all, so little of him left,
that when tramrails crushed his bone to road,
for three days he lay unknown.
Some of a mind might say he gave his soul.
But not with a Judas kiss, dry and spitless:
she still lives, scaffolds risen and shed like cloth.
Some of a mind might see or think this:
as she grows he is reborn.
with small gifts:
seed pods lifted in secluded apses,
a nautilus wound in column to the rafters.
Thus fed, her mineral womb laced round rosewood breast
and grew. Spanish moss twined in limestone and spread,
bloomed in the granite canopy -
years, subsumed in this organic crust, watched
her limbs unravel, root in wet flesh
and, in time, release his own bone,
his own blood into the stone.
He stroked, caressed its rosary mesh, still breathing
the beating heart of basalt throned beneath him
for years he gave his body,
gave nearly all, so little of him left,
that when tramrails crushed his bone to road,
for three days he lay unknown.
Some of a mind might say he gave his soul.
But not with a Judas kiss, dry and spitless:
she still lives, scaffolds risen and shed like cloth.
Some of a mind might see or think this:
as she grows he is reborn.