scorpion
continent's face turned from the sun
posture rotation to her nighttime hours
show me
and indigo the killer steps barefoot and backwards to the abbey wall
walks one foot behind the other
counters corners and breech
four-cornered fortification around the abbess
whose gaze never slips from indigo incapable of misstep or pause
lifting her foot from the scorpion unseen yet spared
(proffer poison
onyx armament and arch)
it is very beautiful
the penitent nods
hastens her heel to the scorpion's body:
beautiful
describes the action of a wheel
Once when I was a child I played in an empty barrel
the satisfaction
not the filth or that it was forbidden
but the sensation
of scampering along the walls of the barrel --
knowing my weight
would roll the barrel over as I climbed --
that to feel
as if I were scaling the interior wall would last
only so long
as I stopped short, lest the barrel tumble with my weight --
I mention this because
she keeps dreaming of a cliff so high and so sheer
that to scale it
she must eat into the rock with her fingers --
but in the dream
the higher she climbs the more manageable the angle
becomes, until the cliff
is flat, until she could stand upright and walk it clean --
yet as she walks
the wall continues to rotate, until the stone is heaven
bearing down
and her back is to the upended vault of the moon.
In the dream she never
falls, but just continues upward, until up is even,
up is down and
then up again, sky slowly spun empty and filled.
I am trying to tell you something
about this woman -- who has asked me to explain
how, if the world
is on a wheel, she can ever learn
to fall.
the academy
appearing initially by twos or threes
to seduce with service or satin
janissaries of the academy appear
as amber as heat leonine
from alien climates through which
the plainly simple simply step:
to the academy and companionship
east of warp wave and burgundy ocean
west of cloud wall artificed
and engineered into pillar and fortification
wall as daily lesson and martial memory
embedded as graduate and assassin
so that this along with other worlds entire
becomes what I did before I came here
Buy Raymond McDaniel's book @ SPD or Amazon
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