parable

and on the dusty  ground a snowy cloth

its warp and weft as tight and thick

as lover’s moonlit words

and bleached whitehard, and napped and ironed

across the eaten holes and fraying hem

and odd, three-cornered tears

with darning stitches flat as hammered nails

and glossed by starch

the honest glary face of blinded years

a splash beside the dusted road

and on the dusty ground a vendor squats

and rocks on heels

as cracked as tarmac’s blistered path

and grained with souvenirs of roads

as long as winter’s close-held tales

and bleak and endless as a wasted life

with face and neck and arms and hands

deep-scored as weathered wood and charred

and droughted, channelled deep by

flooding tears and scarred like landscape far below

the nagging, scudding crow

and past the leathered delta lapped

by sweated salted crusted cloth

untouched by sun or wind is hidden skin

of breasty white and writ with secret runes

of scrawling calligraphic blue

of maps of paths and cul-de-sacs

and journeys without end or not begun

and vistas long since lost to view

and hid from sight the bitter bastard child

named hope when hope is twisted all askew

and on the snowy cloth a single fruit

of varied ripeness and uncertain hue

inflicted here and there with studied wounds

and greedy hungered sucks and bites and bruised

by blows and squeezed by careless hands

a bellied gravid pulpy womb and cradled deep within

and hidden from the worm which writes unthinking want

between the porous skin and bitter pith

the armoured seed lies blinded deaf and dumb

and waits for ruin’s eager laugh to give it voice

and free it from its sugared tomb

to curl and drink the sun or burn or drown

and on the dusted road a host of feet

and in the bone-barred chest a stuttered heart

and on the snowy cloth a weeping fruit

and in the blinding sky a blinding sun