Oh Delilah

Beneath withered trees and falling brown leaves

We sat with our backs along the knotts and gnarls

Laughing out our lover’s quarrels,

Our white teeth bared to the world at large beyond

The veil of cascading death, its last breath a rattle at our squirming feet.

The tree branches, the bark peeling from them in winding lines,

In strips hanging like willow fronds, like warped fingers caught by the wind

And playing a piano of click and hiss and chiks and hushes,

Wound out from the trunk, not grew, not reached, but wound,

They spiralled like screws, like grotesque tendrils stemming

Out from an addled dreamer’s mind, like the fingers pointing slowly

At a dying man, attached to the white ivory bone revealed beneath

The dull black cloak that hangs about the sickly figure whose visage

Is concealed in images that mankind draws for none can face it.

They hung over our heads like that, tangled and clinging to each other,

And we smiled and whispered sweet little things that came out as hisses

Less like the snake leaves and more like the wind brushing through one’s hair — her hair.

And with my back against the battered trunk which had seen some mysterious battle

I wondered if the wind felt like fingers felt when they brushed through her hair,

Or if the sun and stars could feel what my skin could feel when she looked at them.

And there, with my hands laying palms against the dry, brittle grass mixed with cool dew

And sandy dirt jumbled with leaves breaking apart into molecules to feed the worms,

My fingers squirming like the worms, but less slimy and more delighted,

My cheek against the sandpaper bark scratching pleasantly the outer layers

Of my sun-worn skin, I wondered if our laughter would stir waves forever and eventually,

Perhaps, touch our kin.  We thought these things in silence,

Beneath the tumbling, skittering veil of life to death, baring our teeth to the world at large,

And then we would laugh out our lover’s quarrels.