Cold Passion
By Paul Cameron Brown
Some dead undid undid their bushy jaws,
and bags of blood let out their flies.. .
? Dylan Thomas
The land is barren
wears straw wisps
as an unkempt man
might razor stubble.
The land is dry, a faded yellow
in its barrenness.
A sky broods from afar,
a stalactite sun accounts merely a jot
above that thin road into despair.
Grass lies everywhere dead,
faded tongues above an
earth afflicted with scleroderma,
deadliest of skin disturbances,
forerunner of deeper pestilence.
An erasing wind whips the fields
further into bereavement;
turns tiny bits of chaff to pursue themselves
in a mad St. Vitus dance
of cold passion.
Starry night. With halos
about the moon, pale and languid, big as crimson,
far as wind driven flax.
The orange pallor, pale
with liquid swoon and ability
to churn itself about the
night sky or flood in endless
beams our poorer spectacle below.