GOLD LUST

'And naething's heard baith day and nicht But gold at the Mataura.'

Shucked,


bled, smashed into gravel, flank-slashed, their streams


pebble-boiling
burst out of the torn thorny crotch
of hills, rain-beaten, ruttling


cagmag, schist-combs
snapped by the wind's forceps crept over a cocked

plucked chin of the ridge

my


thumbs make, like snow blotches stuck to the rim


of the gold pan-
through the whirligig of my hands


the floods of age quicken


silt, silver, grime,
gold leavened from the cangs of stuttering scree


into life, the mind's

forge


hammering each residual tuft, twig, shard


slung from the ribs
of disembowelled plains, into blood:
the pulse bulling in pursed lips


of seconds stared
down the eyes of some stranger, beyond the surge


of her blackened bed

bred

out of a rock's lust, the void and stumbling sky


impaled upon
my bloodless fingertips, grafted
to the unending torrent.


What my eyes see
crawls from the peering vast of my veins, skewed


undesecrated

mud


wrung out of the whore-fucked stabs of mountain


piercing my sleep
as in dreams their whorling forms
cut my conscience, rivers grope


the slipshod brain
for quartz cobbles churned over the stippled bed


of my being, cwms

gouge


what remains, the remnants of wind-raped sense;


and the nothing
of stone, stubble, leaf, grounded bark,
granite clinking in the dung


is a presence
unswallowed out of the white glyphs that hedge


the slag my palms work-

raw


with some unknown thing, its weight unmentioned


in the slim pubs
where, bald and broken, I peel back
the cracked demeanour, that grips


like a girl's hand
the nature clench-fisted unwinding through


the coils of my cock

taut


as the one lung tugging in my chest, its leash
of knitted bones
looped around the days that stiffen
in my throat, in the chilblains


rasping my flesh
as under some heap of starch and perfumed sweat


the grey crags return

drawn


out of the mountainous blood, the clouds return


crowding my breath
crushing the glimpse of pride words wove
in a swoon of shotgun faith,


caulking my brain
with the black silt flushed from the bottom of the pan:


maculating love.

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