St. Stephen’s Day: home unsettled,
a rupture, and here the ruched
branch has turned itself outward,
its soft, bright innards held up
along the path. At first, a golden
lobe on the oak, leaking
in the mist—fungus, “yellow
tremble,” translucent and half-aglow
with its own light; then more
appearing as I walk. A strange thing
being birthed alone out here
on the edges of the town,
the slow year becoming flesh
in amniotic color; its soft fruit
hung along the corridor of gorse,
and all the while a constant
systole and diastole in the fog
as though the whole wrecked world
were a heart, beating. I stand here
for a while, staring at this half-born
life oozing in the cold, come unstuck,
brought out too soon. Weeks ago,
in the concrete subzero of Berlin,
we huddled on the scrubland
by Ostbahnhof, watched the sun dip,
the light shifting blue, all the streets sinking.
Then, a reprieve—into the club,
its vaulted columns, the steel bars
and long-stemmed lilies, and the heat
scouring our skin. The building
was organ-warm, pulsing.
Inside, long passages of people,
deep sound rippling outward,
and somewhere near the core
a room of masks, apparatus of leather,
a censer of white menthol swung
and resting at eye level.
In the cubicle, a white pill held up,
broken—the heart fluttering,
and then the music, a congregation
undoing their bodies over
and over into beaming shapes.
We found a hidden place, turned
ourselves outward in the humid cell—
bloom and spirit unspooling.
Back here on the heath, running
last summer until our faces
burned, we stopped for breath
in the gorse tunnel—how eerie
it was at dusk, some dimension
we’d slipped into by chance.
I sprinted off into the dark
and you bolted to catch me,
held a blackberry to my mouth—
the sudden tang of it—plucked
too soon. My body winced
and smarted into color, the day
distilled then taken gloriously
inside—host of the world—
and then a kiss—something
soft and secret and unseen. I know
I would kneel to you—blood, yes,
spine, lips. Leave me always
in these waste spaces, where
my head is tilted up to God
and I am a wild thing, glowing.