She's an old garden,
wild, carelessly unkempt,
nervously unconcerned,
with traces and scars
from former gardeners,
prone to anger, ferociously active;
unwarranted rest her greatest fear

but since I don't know when
the prime suspect,
that powerful noblewoman;
sensed behind the upper-case windows
through her gentle harshness,
her gray bird's nest hair
a spider garret of reindeer lichen
and documents,
her breath full of horse handling,
glaciers and 3 o'clock tea

There's something uncanny British about her

She's walking about her younger, painless body;
a brooding lioness 'round a camp fire
in the savannah night

I sustain myself on fermented fear

I take myself not seriously;
just a meager merger of exercise and poetry,
old Jehovah's Witnesses studies
thrown about down 1970's diaries,
in the disappointment of the no-show
of the expected 1975 Armageddon,
in spite of the always trusted fate of death,
hidden in the sound of the lawn mower

The day regains its early July consciousness,
crawling across the threshold of reason
with the morning hours in the rucksack,
me close behind
out of the trenches of self-analysis,
doors creaking in my mind