Lying upon Darkness

I

Stains her face with splendored arms
of winter grasses and blue spiders dung,
they are nesting in the slope of her shoulder
and exit her nipples at dusk, they whisper
as starlings to the ear of her moon.
It trickles as ink to the shadow of her scar,
inverted as basements and thumbs, buried
inside her flesh.
It is a tattoo of bithmarks in negative
and voices of primeval tongues, counting
her ribs of abacus as falling trees
and imploding lungs.

Above the torn curtain of her sleep,
in room of incessant coughings, ghosts
lay their heads of pillows yellowed by her moon,
spit rubies nightly piled high upon splintered
shelves, and turn to browning windows of winter,
crisp as cellophane and frozen as stars.

She is a journey of murmurings
in familiar blood, a river of ancient mouths
swallowing the songs of thousands hearts,
eddying an arc of shattered  light, breathing
a black air of undertow and clay, reflected
as language of sky and rumblings
of harsh palates, and slivered open as rain.

II

She is genius and purple in death,
and mimics her hands of smoke and powdered bones,
and gambles clot against clock.
Blinks her eyelid of rocking chair as creaking dust,
and swills the bitter white root, entangled
around her perfumed wrist of moist dirts.
She remebers her children, walking
backwards over slategray coffins in a far winter,
and mucous slung from fingertips
of an artic shadow.
What was the name of the first to fall ?
Was it “ Squid at Night ” or “ Seashell in Dream ” ?
(Her youngest more beautiful than stars)

She is often
a canyon that cries and severs the eye
and leaves a red wound, deep as slashed meat,
exposed muscle and bone of dry hills, covered
with horses ribs, bleached and blue sage.
The sky lays belly down and watches,
her body of water in blackened orbs, cattails
and willows, dust of pods near the whining fence,
where hides and feathers grow fetid
with ether and scalding winds.

A blue dragonfly escapes her mouth
and drones past her sallow ear.

III

She flexes her ankle, where tiny bones
sing a graveyard hymn of rabid faces
pressed against the day, leaving
frothy beats of foam. She is entombed
with roaring embers inside her mouth,
they are stars and fingers, rippling
through scalp of trees, ans smooth
the scars and lesions with spit
of silken web.
She remembers the sun, and the time
she fell from its center of carbon.
Was she a diamond awakened in fire
and strung together with tongues
of pointed rain, exhumed as crows
recalling their oily black
as dwellings of blood. (One lies rotting
in the field, poisoned without us)

She cannot return,
nor dreams upon wakeful seas,
nor can she regurgitate her children bones
as she wishes, to cradle the femur
the scapula, the crooked spine  who laughed
so much, she smells their sweat to her
fingertips and turns her face away from us
and we are no more.

Joe Dale Tate Nevaquaya

Leaving Holes

Spider palmed up
prays lunar
globular and darkly,
its brittle voice
scratches the trees.

Far away,
thumbmarks dream
of frosted glass.
Old throats eddying
with age,
sound the water.

Fingertips hardened
into sleep, curve
the eggdish of moon.

Birds oily black
peck into the air
with honed beaks,
leaving holes.

Plateaued onto sleep
ghosts dogear the eaves
and silently
salt the sea.

Sonambulist inks
the sperm
pressed against
the shadows,
pressed against
the window of night.

Flesh imparts itself,
hand into wing
wing into tongue.

Mossy gray peebles
their lips stilled,
brood inside the gourd
as spider turns to fog
fog turns to earth
and earth turns to song.

Joe Dale Tate Nevaquaya