A

Polishing broken stones we’d sieved
from the Dix in a sporing spree of splendor
                                                                       splashed
                                                        in celeritous breaststrokes
                             slashing impressionist’s cat’s paws,
                       scumbled petals of murmurous bee’s backs
               splayed and playfully pooled
               against gaping grooves
                       of grandly warbling coral
                              cracked and whisked
                                 among motley froth
                                      as a nacreous argus winking
                                        slipped beneath glistening skin
                                             of a riverbend’s elbow
                                         raw and worn with
                                       wriggling spangles,
                                                                        opaline irises yawning
                                                                               in lissomely rising hymns,
                                                                         in mercurial mead
                                                of ineffable hues
                                                                    and tones that strum against
                                                                                           stone-shod crystals,
                                       creatures recalled amid ageless earth,
                    this whispering web of cerulean, verdigris, jonquil, violet, rose, and bittersweet,
                                       inchoate crystals  flouncing
                                                            gayly and lithely as tumbling gudgeons,
                                                            dash and twist across
                                                            quietly skulking stones
                                                            some shiftless limb among hulking stocks
                                                            must stir and steer around slavering hummocks’ slumbers

                              I

Bunched up in a buckling husk
of culled and cross-bred ore,

some slipshod sled slid limply above but
skulking schools of suckling molluscs
mashed against rusted flints and agates,
innumerable slews of nameless runnying rocks—

what pitiless, fricative furrows drawn,
those honed and harrowed thews of a
sallowed tongue, ribbed wood blocks
beaten raw and bald
to a tyrian fume of integuements
cracked and crushed;

such illustrious smokescreens splayed ‘long silvered scrims,
wan wiggly greaves and gorgets groped like lightfast strokes
upended, stripped by a painfully blushing star;

like stars uncoiled through crouching clouds
echoic of godling’s radiant lashes
reaching deeply descending ephemeral limbs
like morning glories rifle up slumping saplings,
pinning a frail and celestial hair piece
(sere and scalding skin of a cadmium nimbus)
lazily lobbed around steel-wound cheeks,

sharp scowl of some coldly salubrious glower’s
gleeked and straddling probe that’s hatched
across glaring vents of a snowblind visor
cocked across caulk-like glims (some whey-caked
gleeman’s lambrequin spun from a soiled shirt
or a sopping surplice cinched round itching steel
and esurient lichens ruddling chattering joints
and consumptive mail);

pearlescent burls embroiled in bone-braced stocks,
ophidian roots like frozen falls reformed
round slack-jawed slabs of knock kneed, shinnying
limestone stabbed ‘twixt clenching toes;

what ossified hunches huddled in murmurous
cysts ‘long splintered chines of pine, down
dearly deserted and nervous aspens settled,
alas, in Chinle’s shards.

To trade its conspicuous scleras seized
from chillingly ore-licked sand 
with restively roughened, ruddied, and ferrous cherts;

to summon contemptuous grafts unbound
or splintered in urgency’s surname scraped
and cracked across warted shells of sugary citrine,
brittle and bright as a kumquat—