And who's seen Jezebel?
She went walking where the cedars line the road
Her blouse on the ground
Where the dogs were hungry, roaming..
For a long time there was only the acetate reminder on her tongue of motor oil. Behind that, coiled up tight, a conspiracy of notes that sought to fool and forewarn; the bitter, biting, black-coffee of pure gunpowder straight out of the barrel, the sharp and relentless taste of naked wood at her teeth as she lay face down in a deputy's cell on moonless and sunless days with only the shadow of the bars reflected across the wall as compass to the time and her only notion to the travel of it until she was free as the wind on the plains, back then when she hadn't bled out like a soldier in a war that she had begun with her own hands and her own fate. Spirals of dust kicked up at sunset beneath Eli's boots told of a good bye and a resignation to the violent living of these kinds.
Things had begun in ash and begun in rain. Some in fire and some in sin. It was a taste she could discern even as she stared without open eyes up at the criss-crossing branches that glistened overhead. Pallbearers in the still night where every crack of a twig beyond her lingered loud as her heart was heavy.
In the fields of death under a sad oak there was no breathing room for memory. The buried woman remained closed of eye and tarnishing like a painting swallowed by flames and run through with blistering black stain. The coyotes would return to the grave and make their song to the blanket of sky above the forlorn, bare trees. But the sky was not to answer for all the story it had seen. It would continue to look away from what went on below the dark canopy. Where a rambling grifter took rest on the place Madison Rye was buried and how he never again stepped back out of the trees. The dogs and the dirt were hungry.
But no one would remember him. And the night stretched on and sometimes thoughts and people came to the dead woman under the earth. They visited like spectres; places, mouths, teeth, jokes, kisses, clothing, liquor, wood, melting wax, cigarette smoke. The blood of the man was the only abiding and resistant compound in the wicked alchemy of that place in the dark trees in the far out, never-never of a nowhere place. It filled her belly and in it life ran to her limbs.
A lone crow circled above and when it settled on the skeleton branch it let out a cry. The entire prairie filled with an expectant silence. A curling wave of quiet thundering to crash along the dust. The dogs reared and began to dig. To dig. To dig down.
She went walking where the cedars line the road
Her blouse on the ground
Where the dogs were hungry, roaming..
For a long time there was only the acetate reminder on her tongue of motor oil. Behind that, coiled up tight, a conspiracy of notes that sought to fool and forewarn; the bitter, biting, black-coffee of pure gunpowder straight out of the barrel, the sharp and relentless taste of naked wood at her teeth as she lay face down in a deputy's cell on moonless and sunless days with only the shadow of the bars reflected across the wall as compass to the time and her only notion to the travel of it until she was free as the wind on the plains, back then when she hadn't bled out like a soldier in a war that she had begun with her own hands and her own fate. Spirals of dust kicked up at sunset beneath Eli's boots told of a good bye and a resignation to the violent living of these kinds.
Things had begun in ash and begun in rain. Some in fire and some in sin. It was a taste she could discern even as she stared without open eyes up at the criss-crossing branches that glistened overhead. Pallbearers in the still night where every crack of a twig beyond her lingered loud as her heart was heavy.
In the fields of death under a sad oak there was no breathing room for memory. The buried woman remained closed of eye and tarnishing like a painting swallowed by flames and run through with blistering black stain. The coyotes would return to the grave and make their song to the blanket of sky above the forlorn, bare trees. But the sky was not to answer for all the story it had seen. It would continue to look away from what went on below the dark canopy. Where a rambling grifter took rest on the place Madison Rye was buried and how he never again stepped back out of the trees. The dogs and the dirt were hungry.
But no one would remember him. And the night stretched on and sometimes thoughts and people came to the dead woman under the earth. They visited like spectres; places, mouths, teeth, jokes, kisses, clothing, liquor, wood, melting wax, cigarette smoke. The blood of the man was the only abiding and resistant compound in the wicked alchemy of that place in the dark trees in the far out, never-never of a nowhere place. It filled her belly and in it life ran to her limbs.
A lone crow circled above and when it settled on the skeleton branch it let out a cry. The entire prairie filled with an expectant silence. A curling wave of quiet thundering to crash along the dust. The dogs reared and began to dig. To dig. To dig down.