They have predicted an earthquake soon. The beasts

in this cracked desert of one season don’t

seem to know. Neither fled nor silent in

a sunrise the color of agate, days

always the color of sand in your teeth

from oceans you will never visit. Didn’t

the torn page I found this morning resting

against my tire mean something in its fading,

picture of a woman’s splayed legs, my own Iseult

sweet in dawn’s lux, saying Here is your envelope of anthrax. Here

is your heartbeat of glass shutting over every moment like a vise in that over-plied council

of this body, and yours and yours and yours, in the raking gazes of the carcasses stumbling

inside the carcass and those things moving inside us, afloat on a sea of fire,

such force and stuff, continental but drifting.