The Vale of Malevolent Volume

unmythologically we dragged the bodies

there to find themselves finally bodies

backward dragged them over the leaves’

unrest limbs trussed in our perforated thirst

in blackness the moon like a nail snatched

from bed their heads with nowhere to turn

but the backs of our throats which were

everywhere throats once such baskets

of holy and hopesburrow then hornets’ nests

of nameinvain then hammer doors and fists

fastening sounds we made were the fiction

of us reciting itself until all our bark was

callous perhaps at last our loudlack

worried them sick the cities were hard

to remember not long after we killed

the lights not long before we plunged them

darkly under claws our concrete scrabble

tunneled under the suburbs and stormed

the stairs and stories and stories of children

here when knots of fingers slipped from root

and crag when we molar nagged the ankles

married bone to bone we understood their

outbursts what a tongue would not contort

enough to soothe we knew that noise

as well as we knew our swarm at last to be

a denser compaction of lightlessness

than any against which their terror raked

itself raw our jaws recorded their melancholy

for flailing which we engraved on the forests

we recognized the cries we didn’t pretend not

to hear them hearing did not make us want to stop