Ari's Planet

They have made it desolate, and being desolate it mourns to me; the whole land is made desolate, because no man lays it to heart. -- Jeremiah

My children, my lost stones

Return, return to me!
Why have you abandoned my places?
The rocks of your gifted mazes,
among them Leopard walks alone.
Do you not hear Jackal?
Are the sounds of his calls
forbidden to you?
Your stones are falling,
there is no sound of my young builders.
Must your corners remain empty?
My spiders' venom is dry,
they so miss the life you brought.
I love you. My branches seek out your homes.
Are my lands not as before?
Does my beauty vex you?
I sent you sweet fragrance,
sky messengers,
ringed your hearts with my towers,
built corral castles, oceans for your facings.
You asked my rivers to move:
for you I moved them,
do not curse my deserts.
Now you have touched moon,
do your dreams leave me
for the jewels of the sky?
Bring back yourselves,
let me embrace your bones.
I call, but it is a thousand cycles,
your songs no longer grace my wilderness.
Did you not once laugh in your cities?
These are only my lost stones,
I will take them back into me.
It is what you left me,

Spider

Unmeditating in my symmetric castle
still, between quiescent impulses
of ganglionic links
in curled veins I sleep.
Dew lays all night
across the trusses of my snares.
Those who occluded the moon
on drunken flights--
cords compress their wings,
mouthed operations carefully dissect.
My resilient knot cannot be torn
my children are loosed--
from canopies they stream
across delusional orbits,
their venoms ply courses
through dark forests,
lost cities.

September 17, 2006