← v9n2, Fall 2010
Poetry · Volume 9, Number 2

Ochre xiii

World door, crimson your geometry.

Our flesh ascends the heaven-road. The air now thins.

Red-hooded Charon pilots us in spirals, laboring

Up to the precincts

where stars commence.

As words that are unspoken, he bears us in his mouth.

Entrails & viscera, we are the salt tang

Of sinew, of marrow, of the word made flesh.

A jigsaw of syllables to be arranged

Once more to human form. The sky gods await us there.

In vast huts & tents

they ready their tools.

Brother vulture spits us out upon the tent floor.

We writhe & quicken to verb & glottal.

Eye socket, nostril: they mold the clay. They bestow

The mouth from which we words shall burrow.