Love makes the world drown,
in sapless harmonies, as mud
trickles one drop at a time.

Bareback trees swirl in omniscient time,
hands clasped, for the earlier-bird receives
the spare canvas.

Mud-ridden dilapidated Delilah’s
advance around the sparse town where
bedridden soldiers do not break the ladies backs.

For when wood is chopped, wood chips
startle the chipper creatures in crevices
over the land.

Romance scurries
in the painted face of the woman who throws stones
at His or Her, wooden houses that shatter.

Evaporated into the silence of the woods, where the dissipated shadows
concur the abandoned, collapsed petals, all of which made their
last impressions when
beaten with noiseless, split-lipped nomads in their crippled manners.

Often as one bird tumbles another trembles and some time after
there is a silence.