Unsure

Is that a subhuman rummaging in the thicket

or the ghost-dog of things past?

What’s that lurking by the gate of the womb?

The stereotypical apparitional banshee?

A heretic’s spleen in aluminum foil?

Neptune’s brightly feathered lure?

This is either incense smoke or a funnel web.

Moonflowers, or a weathervane.

A centaur coughing among the bulrushes

or the waning of an intense longing.

Perhaps this is what the darkness writes for you –

odes to the morning star’s departure.

You feel your way around in the bramble.

It feels like a rune stone or diplodocus egg.

No, it’s the pendant Sisyphus misplaced.

It’s the headstone of your mother’s mother.

Mid-day arrayed in midnight’s blackness.

The last wolf of Iberia.

Time stutters, stalls, staggers.

You seem sure you’ve been here before,

but you’ve never been here before.

You lie among the ammonites and trilobites.

Face down in the earth

everything looks like heaven.

Bruce Mcrae