A lake rose in his imploded cone -
cloud veiled the birth;
it snowed ash for a year.
As sky grew back
the steaming vents went out -
healing began. We came.
It was black crumbly earth
between your fingers.
So we planted roots hard
as our withered old women,
and I knew they'd come good with a
fat gold crop
because their ancestor was a fire god.
Like all of us that live
from this land.
late frost stickying the water meadows
where they'd found the bones of a drowning.
We were hopeful, held our voices;
the reeds' small talk whistled
louder than our archaeology.
When we dug out those earthen jars
the glaze still shined. Inside one
something had ripened
that trickled to mud in my fingers. But
briefly, it felt sticky, ready for eating.
Eight hundred years before
a dead woman stored this treasure;
for a moment on my hand
it still felt forbidden.
bubbles scum from hot vents
stinking like a bad stomach.
The brown animal land
fumes; out of erupting insides
magma
earth-quaking come
all plosives and filthy curses,
the oldest igneous wrath.
But these are creation's juices
the dirt of birth,
to shunt aside old boundaries
with the bad language of any brat.
So when the fumaroles steam
and the sky is rinsed clean
this land smells like the sun.
big muddy creeks burrowing blunt heads,
worm blind, inland.
Thus my house has skin diseases, ceilings
canyoned by seeping cracks, fat spidered angles.
Over my bed a hectic blotch letters
its holy scripture of slime. In this
winter laboratory,
given the rains, the creeks rising
so floorboards are mush, rot rends wood
it's no shock there's a stink
from the rooty matter of the dead
who dwell just under us.