Crocodile Fear

Down the mountain after dark;
See the prickling blush of electric streets
Like jewels down a crocodile's spine;
Black water licking clean his claws.
I fear reaching out to meet his teeth

Elizabethan

The desert sky is wild and red but even he soon pales,
As the mother long horizon calls and cradles him to bed.
And one black thing circles low with black and outstretched sails;
The cracked and broken earth below tells no secrets of the dead.

Who knows but that the steady eye will catch the earth below,
To see a broken thing enthroned in the dry and bracken brush.
The black thing spirals down the sky until he comes to know,
The smell of warmth still leaving, and the breath of sudden hush.

And then these two may sit awhile; as his appetite allows,
Before the heart is ravaged and the mind is like devoured.
Feathers ripple off the bone; the beak recites its vows,
The black red thing is hurried on; too hungry to be coward.

The heart has filled the sky against a lonely scavenged night;
The sun and he will bleed brief hours before the final bite.

Childhood is

Childhood is
a ring of grass
left beneath the summer pool.