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

Ochre xxi

World door, crimson your geometry.

Our flesh descends the birth-river.

Creaks open to the shrill of light. The doeskin

On the cave floor viscid, matted in the torches’

Orb & spill. Our hands grope, stunned

By this confounding plentitude.

They reach

For the nipple’s new moon. A hand ax

Severs our path to the firmaments of water,

The birth cord flung onto the snow. The new moon waxes

With a droplet of alabaster.

We are thrust before it. The mouth has learned to wail,

To fasten, to conjoin. We swallow & we still.