A fox’s leap across the road
last sun on the threshold of the frontier.
Then only the shadow
of a diurnal moon
the echo chamber
and crows in circles on the snow.
Winter journey
closed metaphor slithering
on an opaque mirror
droplet of semen
pulsing on unfecundated skin
unconnected context
journey literally in winter
literally a journey
along roads oozing turbid rivers
in the frozen waves of the mountains
with embedded trunks
white masts of subterranean fleets
until well to the East
the country hotel
empty and dubious
a five-star farmyard cock with feathers plucked
because the chef had lost a star
for using too much apple in his sauces.

I paid the bill for the free journey
years later
paid it in instalments with added interest charges
when I hardly could remember
where I’d come
and what I’d come for when I got here.
There’s never that much left for those who just arrive
not even going back
which would be to arrive again at the non-place
that only exists in being left
and so remains
a garden buried in a dark wood.
I still have the receipt and battered bag
where I put the tourist guide
translated from a language
I have now forgotten
or never knew
into another equally unknown.

The orange grove covered with lemons,
the erosion of winter grooves
in the luscious body known by heart
flabby muscles cellulite and veins
in the tides of the perennial dunes
in you my love in what we are
the frankincense and myrrh of lust
an erection precarious and persistent
against the innards of the moonlight’s lips
the night the light the shadow the dawn.

I went to look and saw it really was a fox
like the one that ran across the road
waiting outspread on the porch
where the neutered cat sleeps out its days
indifferent to the libertarian life
and yawny from a diet of canned flesh
Since the fox was calling I had to go.
I gave the cat its daily ration
and the porch was a jungle the road the sea
the red fox a bus
like those that never come or have just gone
and always require the right fare ready.
So it seems that the moral of the story
is hanging between fox and cat
in a protest against collective transport
when after all the road has overflowed
the jungle has no way back and no way out
and everyone who travels is alone.

I knew the seasons by its changes
the squirrels the crows the seagulls.
Spring came and it opened its knots
in precipitate and fleshy flowers
of tactile elongated fullness
that tapped upon the window pane.
It bore no fruit my chestnut tree
and factually it wasn’t even mine
or only mine because we’d eyed each other
every morning for over thirty years.
But it bore flowers and squirrels and seagulls
summer autumn crows spring
ignoring the biological accounting
of transmissible fertility.
It bore flowers as if bearing poems
and didn’t need to write them down
like lovers loving in a single body
not knowing where one ends and the other begins
wide open in vaginal lips
with uterine long phallic flowers.
This year again it flowered on time.
But winter came in flowering May.
They said the root had split in two
the trunk was hollow at the heart
they couldn’t understand how it bore flowers.
They cut my tree down branch by branch
leaving only the root and its emptiness
and on the ground below
the hot snow of its puzzled
impossible
flowers.