Hunger

April is the cruellest month.
—T.S. Eliot

All winter long we mourn the sun,
that god we love most in absence.
Blood dreams uneasily
in a moist underworld, and sap
knows its place in the darkness.

Chill air mellows on a chickadee’s song.
Green light returns leaf by leaf
from the shadow side of the moon.
Bare teeth shine in granite mouths
that tear at blue sky.  Something moves
in the veins, something animal.

Bones must be eviscerated,
lives sucked clean.  Something moves
down the mountainside, looking
to be made one with you.

From this sleep, a terrible
awakening.  A beauty so profound,
blood drips from its jaws.

—from the collection Star Seeds
2009 New Orphic Publishers, Nelson, BC Canada

—New Denver is a village in southeastern British Columbia, Canada, along the shore of Slocan Lake.