Morning, multiplex loam blooming in round billows awash through mind;
Phæton tiding in cool dawn; as his wave broadens its surge, its deep
Basin widens, whose id waters the earth; foaming, its parts dispersed,
Colloid, geysering heat, jetting a blue tint through the black of night
Deepens color with birth, labors in gloom brightness decays the cold.
Fibers gel in the flux, aspens arise, trembling where red-tailed hawks
Forage, buoyed by their broad wings in the swells, splashing their tails in fire.
In these waters at dawn we embraced,
In the brine of a body of light we entwined,
Enshrined in a trace of corona we rose
To ignite in the fusion now spraying upon us
From the inconstant might of a sun.
Lucent Gulf-streams extrude axa,
The reins reigning expungtive flame.
Fine, the threads from a mind – taxa
of hooves wild to be loose, became
Sunless, fusing the quarks, quasar
At heel, juke in a lepton haze:
Horse and nuclear child, stray czar
Tossed tracing Apollo’s maze.
Moments. Moments they lace tracks of
The god, godless they track his course.
Nanoseconds unhinge shock-shove of
Reigns slipped from his hands, the force
Throws them wide of the mark, National Beaks, talons in liver, black
Bile, unbridled decay breeds in the gut: value ensconced in cash
Price, dismemberment gains points on the slut-glutting investment floors;
Coeval body counts keep factories going solvent: “we feel we must
Cut some funds from the schools. Nuclear bombs must be produced, our well
Fare depends on this choice.” Phæton is pressed, frightened and tossed. The earth
Ages quickly in fire, weeps (can you hear?), prays for a moment’s rest.
Phæton grips, and is gripped; captures, is caught; falters, is pithed in flight.
Lightening stifles him. Hands fuse to his eyes, knees to his chin his blood
Powders, sweated by cleaved bone-pop of heat, drifts in a fore-noon dusk.
When the sea falters in motion,
Salt, seaweed, ambling crab, gull,
Stark-naked man, under sun, sear,
and their lives suddenly charcoal;
When the flash beckons our eyes – blinds:
When the flare is shot forth at us,
When the heat-suffused crimson dusk
Is a broad roaring of new light,
Then shall we weep blood from our eyes,
Burn as we bleed, our stark shadows
Fusing with concrete, steel; melted
Glass in our pores, dust from our bones.
Übermenschward we press atoms
Like grapes, wine of such fusion sheathe
In long bottles. Their pressured corks burst
Skyward to steal light from the rightful sun.
Death-ward we press our might, hopeless,
Cantering fools, bastarding birth,
Bandy the life given to live,
The life never given to live again.

(written c. 1982)