BPR 50 | 2023
—Ohio River Valley, Huntington, WV
1
Dear Land of And, backyard bluebells
and lilies of the valley and wild violet
and various long-in-the-tooth grasses,
huge clovers and unknowable tuber blades—
Dear Abundance, why not leave more
spaces where the flowers
you spur can ripple air
and the notes spread
and fade, each shaped
like the bell it rang?
All else is corpulence.
2
Malta’s ancient temple builders sculpted fat women,
the breasts and labia hyperbolic,
and shelved them where priests had laid the dead
clean bones. The people barely eked
a living from the arid land,
but the figures’ waist-thick thighs,
the torsos’ zaftig smiles manifest plenty’s
want. The diggers also found, carved
into the cavern walls, holes
like snake burrows, and when someone
spoke or sang, mouth to an aperture,
the voice echoed all over—prayer channel,
earth mouth, the whole temple, an ear.
3
A spider web, a silent
line, flies by, glinting,
too high to be strung from spruce
to roof, going where air takes it,
an archaic and simple flying machine,
too thin to hide a pilot—but she’s there,
spider I can’t see, spider I’d be,
the high-rider who mates, lays eggs,
and wills herself to wind, the silk she is
and spills, sheer like sound,
light, air. Air is her pilot.
I’ve seen a spider shaped
like a violin, maybe this one, her string fit
for a high C. (If you ride the string
are you the music?)
More likely the orb weaver, Cyclosa turbinata,
shaped like a top, spins by.
She must unwind her silk
eternally, the long line
of her longing to be
elsewhere or more.
4
Those ancient voices the temple
still echoes? Fat ladies
singing blue bells, grain,
the starlight-fine lines
linking here and there—
their bellies ripple
the land’s ridges and furrows.
Did you know the Druids
rang bluestone megaliths?
Stones were the first bells.
Earth is.