EACH BEAST WEARS FLOWERS

Each beast wears flowers, each god cotton robes.

This deep gorge answers rivers.

Apollo’s track trails blue fog.

Shadows grow white incisors, minding

their own respiration. The cutting edge, the withered bone

pursue each other. The statue, mossed over,

breathes elegies in and out:

may rushing water freeze.

I choose silence. Someone died here.

That big tree, fallen forever in the minds of survivors.

Earth mourns, a vast, silent sheet.

That boy rowing a skiff’s only twelve,

can’t know the blood-red river

plunging over falls, the slaughter

now rinsed clear. No warning.