Chinese picture jasper

​

Our memory 
is a place 
like Chinese picture jasper 

slow-cooked 
by chaos hands’
ecology dice 

​

remember 
the red-maroon days

the mineral fields
of skeleton tree
& warm infinity sands

 

what luck we had then 

the buffalo looked like ideas of buffalo 
form black & soupy
drawing out division 
of iron from ether

 

remember 
the red-maroon days
when we shared blood & bone with dust 
below the black moon 

 

[you can watch it sit still
on a rectangular cut slab
like a window into us
a poem of passing 
whittled to a point
through details refined
by some unchosen arbiter

 

what he wants of it
anyway]