Bernard Page 2

And drawn and quartered the city
gives good head abruptly detached,
brands in bloody letters Liberty,
hung mouths, the muted kiss.

The peak shafts to the core.
Snow lards the sandstorm,
covering tanks and Blackhawks with a gravy
succulent and deeply strange. The big dog eats

off on his own. Crumbs fall like bombs
exploding at his feet. He doesn't care.
The mountain rises at his whipping tail.
Thunder blacks his teeth. He eats alone.






The Poem of Lady Xok 

In a windowless room at a temple's heart,
come with her husband to unmask the future,
the favorite wife of King Shield Jaguar,
Mayan ruler of Yaxchilan,

is shown bowing before us in heavy corn-silk,
maize-wrapped splendor, on a scarred and
    welted,
slightly cracked, sumptuary stone.

Obedient to the gods (as if we might be gods,
standing under the stone lintel of her future),
her husband holding beside her and above
a burning spear, his headdress splitting
like a ripened husk on his flat, squeezed head,
above a hard face and jagged eyes,