Silical gravel and gneissal stones

and calco-growth lay down their bones

and one by one outlive their flesh

to buttress the sky and build their lores

in pillared moments’ mockeries.

The epochal fish with interlocked

spines, anemone petals arthritic

grown beneath the rising shelf

of abalone and filamental

shrimp, the moray teeth in rictal

grin, a lobster’s claw still tight

agrip: the grid that underlies

the sea-top’s scrim.

Yet more: the bubbling afterbirth

not yet cast out but hoarded to leak

in painful spurt its nutrient floor

and height, soon solid in a colder

glare, umbilical’d mother and child

in labor still, emerging to sputter

in paternity’s light.

And moving all upon the skin

the rabbit and the lion paw,

the saurian, the cricket foot

upon the sleeping dinosaur,

the trunken-bloated baobab

oerspread the mushroom soil

and browning grass on which it lay,

a dais for the deus and his day.

The blanket: of the wind without,

the widespread bustle-skirt in thread

of pointillist glint and lances

breaking on the shield, their pieces

falling dust to ground, intelligence

myriad-fashioned shooting from

the hip of gunster number one,

globe-spread, passing through

to some effect ’round other suns.

Woven through the threads of my blanket,

reflecting like facets of glass beads,

are flecks of every bird that pecks

its daily bread, of each insect and its

wings or octet of legs that scurries in

the dirt and basks atop a leaf-end.

All trees woven there, catalpas and

oranges littering the soil and striped

curtains of ropy lianas and grapevines,

and satin moss and the humblest grass.

Elephants and capybaras caught in the

warp, cobras and Venezuelan iguanas.

Every man on earth and the glittering

marbles of his eyes, the shine from

his fingernails and teeth, the bright

flutter of the cloths on his back,

laboring and loitering in Wooster

and London and Vladivostok.

What of the clouds and their

shifting spectra, the drifting

of the Sea of Marmora, the

escarpments running into the

rivers and gorges of Arizona?

Everything woven into my blanket!

I shelter in its lee fending off

summer and winter, as any Tuareg,

indigo, does, thick around me, my face

buried in it, clutching with desperate

clutch against the wind that seems,

with each passing year, to strip away

more and more of the weave,

dissolving the fabric and dimming

those threads that once glimmered

like so many facets of colored beads.