this sapling’s brittle lips yet shells reshaped,
some thorned compulsion pressing
ponderously into succulent sands,
each grain could uncoil with whimsied warmth,
would coldly recoil in densities restless—

every ambered ember braving
daily, breath by lurid breath, 
what whetted intensity,
breathless immensities smoldering  
nacreous, snaking, vast, refulgent,
hapless, glory-lathed realgar, ochre,
eosin lithe and deepening:
autumnal canopies crowding cloudless azure
stars once stoked to unplumbable pyres—

fires cribbing husks and cradling hulls;
some brittle, pellucid placenta
harts found fleeing freely through
these sorrel curls and tyrian tresses 
trunks, our hearth had yet transposed
to azure ghosts and griseous embers, 
slough to mark their mounting rings,
rough remnants of those countless trysts
with winter’s wolves and summer’s pips;
this vividly sun-freaked caul recalling
molten mirrors hearts contuse
and roil in lissomely tender laps,
wet wrinkles lapsing smooth and grooveless;
bruises breakneck rains retrace,
long ribs that ripple firm and rare
that solely formless silence slakes—

such supple, pellucid placenta racked
upon pale prongs a hart must brattice;
horns that Harvest, hunched in heaving
high its lithe and leaden crescent,
strings with the shimmering strum
most chittering bats must swell with,
sucking sweetened, succulent pith
and pips their pulp-pale stool sails silently rootward—
Know then:

Placidus’s ghastly scowling god
seems evermore a smear of worming earth. 
Our star denies its darkness,
some may deem some soddenly thoughtless clot.
It harbors in its heart all vernal songs
and smoldering autumnal leaves;
one dark and brittle clot recalls
each sprig it was and once more
still each stock and lock it ever thus 
and still again shall be and be—