poem + song

let us write to the westerlies
dark mother you have mother
falls in the dark mother
dark your snow

let us sing mother
to the northern mother
mother
dark dark

your cold low clouds
dark in the glaciers
rise and turn us
from our thoughts as tall

so we embrace scale
minding your scansion
from the light
like far tortoises roll

how make us feel us through
sand slow through
shade and groping
moving to hide

how though pleasant dark
you be eaten and toward trees
we'll eat no more
we stand mother

you turn us and like these trees
our ground for years
a thousand
shading from our lips

your seeds
and the ferns trickle
how slow we become
how rare we begin

see you our tempers aloud
we feel otherly
airing a mind
into your veins

we have been fierce
all this while arching
fingers men and clinging
to you pore by pore

giant magmatic oceans
off the ships
often rise to the shore
broken trees they are

just to look inside
rolling down mounts
your thinking belly
whine to her and of your tongue

we go on singing
put the tip on her wick
so as the sailors, of old,
who ululating are dogs

and monitored
the giant octopi
spoke twenty tongues
Oh she is in her skirt

this girl whom I love
I watch her dance from afar
Her shoe bells jingling
Her hair in braids
Ah, I sigh, there is my love who
does not know me

My friends laugh to see me so wistful
and bid me drink love away
She is only a ghost they tell me
who lives on earth for a day

So I drink and in time I forget her
I forget her skirts and her bells
I look to my shoes and the ground
and hear her sweeping

It rings like a bell in clouds
and cries in time with my shyness
I fall for it
everytime