Toby Martinez de las Rivas

In front of the gate whose tubes hummed in the wind
like owls hooing each other across a dark field, Isabel,
was the firepit’s tract of soot-soft & snow-white ashes.

It went deeper than you knew, after years of bonfires,
dusks when sightly wings of paper flared in a woosh
of sparks & ghosted into darkness like minor stars.

Beyond the singing gate lay the dark field which ate
the bodies of lambs & threw up the bleached fans
of pigeon wings: the grass grew red in those places.

I dug the pit with a shovel & scooped bucketloads
to feed my father’s garden which drew down silver
mouthfuls of ash & the tangled brown potato haulms.

All the while the gate hummed tunelessly in the wind:
Tunelessly, but with range: high & low, long & short,
disconnected, artless, dumb life struggling into song.

I struck so reckless, Isabel – hot, one-handed, peeved,
& clanged a rock that hung in earth as consciousness is
said to inhere in the self, or the self to hang in the body.

High, low, long, short: my arms went dead, a dazed bird
burst from my skull, the rock, humped, deaf to the blow.
A brilliant ringing in the blade secured itself to that axis.

Snow, the first two or three flakes, like down
Trailing after a shot duck, lodges in the stiff
Blades of grass its indeterminate splendour.
Like hunger, it admits no other possibilities.
The snow knows everything there is to know
About being male: power, intrusion, decline-
The eternal, negative radiance of the snow, its
Purposive destruction of contour, annihilated
Topographies of earth a man’s body hardens
To, beneath its coverlet of ruthless white skin.