Before You: Brief Eclipse

Before You: Brief Eclipse

You don’t have to do a bloody thing

though it's all about you.

Only you have to move.  You do.

You have to turn.  You turn the same way

you’ve always turned, or at least since

your captivity: a carousel for your

master's dominion.   And clouds,

undular mane, are both reins and preferred 

choice of horse, whatever shade the wind spits:

of course a beryl male and his mare, though

who’s in front of whom is always

this gamble, is always his cocked

tail and the unplumbed frontispiece of sky —
not exotic along the wild flat grass-

land planes, where dust moats of lust

on the run are hoof and teeth and necks red

with acquiescence after fury.  Does it

matter who chooses what back

to slide down onto, to wait

for the music the push the stiff

grip on the pole?  And those beams  

under the canopy, buckling (though no one

notices) under their unnumbered temple

years weight?  It’s a real leap here

but remember Samson leaning against

the pillar, after his hair grew back, after

they’d taken his eyes, after they’d put him out

to stud?  He’d be the prize on this carousel.

After the all night party, blind and tied

he’d lean and breathe and no one 

believed he’d come back into his own.  While

the thousand thousand thousand spit and mock

his cock and long ball sack (to provoke

their wives no doubt, who rode him, more

for the climb and slide, climb and slide)

(and the small consequence of sons) all along

those gawkers, a stroke

of luck they’re all here, look up at the broad

pavilion, how it must’ve seemed

as close as a moon could get, so close

it might, if the strings were plucked

in the right order and time, fall.  The building up
to blue, the quick vein pulse and grit.  And then.
And then all that ahhhhh ease

of letting go.  All his weight against

the pillar, the slow shade going over

their faces the way clouds do all the night

and day, and will go all the way all the time

through, the ceiling—obviously too heavy

on its own, and every one of those clumsy drunks

looking up in awe, the blood still  

pulsing off, the gourds and millet, the bladders

of wine caught, but not before they’ve gone

from tongue to tongue, each grape, each seed

safe in the stomach, in the womb of the wives

who stayed home, away from the soon to be,

but not yet, not yet, dead.