Monday, April 16, 2012

Barbara Mor, from "Oil"

There are nets in the eye that catch the light, images
like wild beasts are gathered in, tints of flesh
moving through high grasses, blades of helicopters rounding up
stray clouds, a white horse
rears behind a chain-link fence, a woman convulses
thru the thick eyelashes of death, hidden cameras who capture
earth like prey, angles of skin thrashing and
 the steel neighing of the wind, and bodies falling slowly
inward to the spread retina,
as the drowned sink thru darkening lenses of the sea

skeins groping, gathering what is done, naked bodies
on ocean bottom wrapped in
bailing wire, blind maps, powerlines coiled as serpents, veins
of rabid dogs, ancient fish swim by,
growing gears and claws, the brain
is drawing black lines around the faces of windows, bored guns
stretch out calm along the sides of sharks
submarines sunk between small buildings, dinosaurs
in extinct shoulders of engineers, stars, what is left of
neon wedged in dark throats
shiny black lines stitch up anemones, vulvas, the sucking mouths
of the great crowd, continents
wounded like beasts trailing bandages of water, images
twist in the brain like
snapshots of caught fish, trussed
with ropes of salt and imploding umbilical knots

mortices and scales of deep museums, reptiles of
cold walls, long echoes, the weight of oceans on locked glass cases
of eyelids, cracks in stone where horses
are leaping, hooves thrashing out
nerve-nets hang in underground rooms, strung with pale tissue,
wrenches of iron, ganglia open their mouths
and the wind screams thru them, tapestries evolve thru skulls
in perstaltic rolls, the history of protoplasm
of surgery, of mirrors, lost civilizations with their skins
preserved around steel bowels, calcium blueprints
in the tile of floors where
people danced ten thousand years below the sea

sunk in beds of gravity and black fire, basalt
stitches in flagellates and cities from
our still bones, and bellies of spiders drift among the waters
with silent engines, all nets are loosened
in a steady breathing,
and tightened again, and loosened again, as photons and
worlds are woven and undone by
the retina, as eons sink thru night
with its webbed hands.

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