Lule
Inspired by the works of Shakespeare and Walt Whitman

And in this phantasm, flu-dream: the slender hind, oak-bodied elk trumpets out in the foggy elms, soak-mossed and frog-hailed, weeping of their tribulations from the fires of ages, horns scorched by human thunder;
an archivist owl scribes down every fairy birth in the willows, recipes for elf-balm and shot-heal, gossip from the rabbit den, chittering of new twigs and thistles, renunciations of cursed hounds never to heel at the beck of another master but to wander, lost, a bastard race to die in the crack-hallow pines;
undines diving, caked with frond and froth in the wind-swept hollow, their ponds pith and pitch with soot, sooth-saying of shipwrecks on far-tossed shores, dreaming of mergirls with pearl eyes and pebble teeth, to comb cockles from their hair, to kiss the breath of sailor death into their dark backwater mouths;
a grain of sand, a cup of tea, misery lamented, one dark drop of ink on a fingertip — my words so described - to smudge the tabletop of time with my twittering tremble, to darken the halls of the ancients, buffed gleaming like dagger of Romeo’s doom, with my step - so hesitant, a quaver, like hoof before harpoon - seems sacrilege.
Do not send Dickenson’s Fire Brigade for me. These words will musk and oleander like a bouquet: better to spread for the birds to pick and weave into a cradle.






