Landscape; Self Portrait

Early winter like a set jaw.

Us sitting on its little neck in the moonlight

where the stone wall’s urged north on its mortar,

and by my blankness I am loving someone.

The memory of her body a glacier

slowly goading my boulder into push and give.

The scent of pines and crushed ivy.

Wood sorrell dripping on love’s pink.

Hush, tremulous and thin, like a slug trail,

pooling in the measured creases

of my stone. Then, a slight warmth,

the cure of a pond slimming its ice disc

toward the shore, where down among twigs

sap promises the oration of amber

in a thousand years.

Tarantula

Crouching in silence,

a fleecy pandurate frame - arachnid,

the creep-fear, torturous brute of gulch and

grainary. Octad eyes dead in

lethargy (with

so many legs, it

seems paralyzed by the ability

to move too much) it goes about things in

anthemic privacy, speaks of

commissure through

its thin, portioned

limbs. Slender. This is what we are after.

Not a body more head-like than the head.

It takes pride in urticating

bristles, flicked out –

in implication

of its toxin. When asked to wound, how to

hesitate? Is not the state of all things

venom? Reflexively, we see

it waiting for

us near our homes, it

dangles on silk from speckled alder and

buckthorn, a hairy, bane-stocked compass rose.

The azimuth of these dials. Might

we give up claim

to the knowledge of

its docility, describe its peculiar

eating habits and uniformly dense

outer coat? We will say it is

the biggest of

the small things. One tries

to fabricate a breccial moult and

distinctly patterned horripilation

in order to distinguish one

confinement from

another. Spider,

this is what the spine is. A will that says

of love, I will abide within it until I

die from it. In tandem we urge you to

clarify your-

self. David asked twice

where to go. What we would become, yielding

to that dance, your bite, the tarantella? –

black with flamed hair, seldom eating,

no hands, no throat.

Mast

Lost at sea.

Surely we are like little rowboats.

My back,

blossomed into a great shell.

My hands,

splintered into sculls and a slave.

My body,

concave, with a bucket for fish and urine.

O my King, this was all for you.

We are calling to each other. You, with your world. 

Me waving my paddle.

I ask you with water, with strait,

bilge, lagoon, breaker, headland, and gaff –

with sea, land, and what land was, the volcano

(it, too, remembers) –

to be afloat in your fortress

   extended on a sheet of moving diamonds.

What it comes down to: where things are, bless me.

The great are buried with many treasures.

For instance, the Earth was interred with you.

O my King, that you had not died before I could see you –

That I had more grace than salt –

valerie wetlaufer