The Crown

Up here you can see more
than in the squatting fields.
This mound assumes us,
suspended, where sky pours
over a lofty earthen table.

It is sad though. The sun
sets, orange and blood, with only
a swelling doctrine, spouting fable,
that we are a higher part
taller than our human dwelling.

But the curves of distant counties
on the prolate eye, they follow
no blue heights or red, red
Hells – It is one delicious roundness,
they espouse, there to starve us hollow.

I cannot pinch the new moon
down, or garner stars into
cupped palms, where in the dip
they cannot grasp and on the
tip they flit around –

What can be held is grit and
grain. Circular, too, translating
much the same. We’ll lay right down,
ooze with the twilight vapour;
caress the length of small, small grass

Until our bones clack together.
This is where we gorge on dust,
as dust, dusty ivory splinters, where
we are above everything, rolling around;
restless. But somehow it buries us,

Like being sealed in the crack of
a fold of paper, seeds in an endless
furrow of flecked brown –
passive when fat, thick thumbs
thumb the crease down.


Simon Peter Everett, 2008 ©