If flies be dragons
and they may you know.
In large desiccated brambles
where wasps go
involuntary blue-green coelacanths
these Devil's Darning Needles
wedge in Flying Circuses
frame pale diaphanous wet green sky
as shooting columns
twig and Rock Face.

There, fire-bush
entrance scrapes paler wax
green fronds then
Blue Holes into canopies
thru the stars.

[11]

Sheldrake, a magician
—the mandrake
a mythic plant whose shriek
drove listeners wild....
this lake, Sheldrake
and its windsong-heartswoon
counterpart, Skootematta
with Shabomeka &
a whiff of Buckshot Lake to boot,
waves lapping the
prayerful stones—
water's edge
the earth's bones....
Lakes an art-form
hardscrabble scribble
shorthand on a blessed land.

The mysticism of basic shadows,
occult shapes of ourselves.

[12]

Crickets are a strange place,
cricks of dew hemmed
with hoar-frost
mushrooming by a door.

The glens are fashions of a loom
eerie pads
are nightly rooms.

The padlocks
remove the key
as grass-hoppers
keep the meadow free.

A twilight world
along the edge
at rapier's length
this light, this point
at end of the void.

[13]

The anger past
as a cat arches her back
a thickly rich robust anger
blackest coffee in a thick
earthen mug
this thug & mugger with sufficient
silk thread.

Yet the assassin is back
with catcalls & hiss
cortisol adrenalin that
lunge like that cat
rapid-fire along the back garden fence
this patio stroll
my senses black.

And time luxuriating like a thick veil.

That dread pack with
anger in the lead
—what prevokes it—
obviously really
a pack of violent
running lies—wolves
hell-bent running over
intent on deceit,
thievery, then some.

A narrative with a long reach.

[14]

I saw Bear
shopping with Santa Claus
at the North of 7 Plaza
only he wasn't wearing a bib—
only a cotton-wool imitation synthetic
polystyrene white fluffy instead.

I saw the Bear
gracing a wall at the
Old Trout Lake Hotel
(part-time job),
looking self-satisfied,
smug back of the Mosque