High Country Wireless (Imbolc, 2000)
– for Angela
1. The spirit country is too vast to string with wire, to arc into a blade-sharp wind and stand tar-soaked poles across the bottomless miles. Clouds curve white along the peaks, sift down through the back country beyond the boundaries. Night climbs up, carves itself into the valley floor. 2. Cathedrals of commerce interrupt the sky. But lapping on the shores of sleep, dreampop pools – rainbowfish dancing in silvery tides. Sweat freezes on our faces, our breath like angels flying back to Heaven. 3. We bind ourselves with ice and darkening sky, we are blood music lingering in a booth at the back of the bar, we fumble for wavelength on an antique dial.... We are the disconnected generation: our fathers and mothers, broken on the Christian Wheel our unborn, more circuitry than flesh our brothers and sisters and friends and lovers, whose anesthetic memories of us are dust motes floating in a stained glass haze.... But you shimmer, vermillion gash ripping the afterdark, haunting the dollhouses in Daddy's little dreams. Shine it on burn it down scream until the night sky shatters raining shards of star and borealis caught, like glitterpits black and sparkle in the laughter of your eyes.