Madness is a boy
playing with the moon
on fire
a girl with stars
between her thighs.

Madness has the taste
of flesh
slow-simmered
on an open pit.

Madness has the sound
of spreading lips
the clash of opposites
then one.

Moonmad lovers
take each other’s shape
as madness takes
the shape of fire.

2.  Stratified Rocks, Nature's Gift of Gneiss Lava Iceland Moss... (1920)

Embedded in the permafrost
(a place of death)      
trapped between the layers
of the earth
in foliations of its past
(beneath, beside)
in crawls of rock
and undulating cold
a gift--
like an ancient city’s stones
piled upon themselves
and still alive in moss.    

We are but machines
or humankind
the two of us, you and me
and/or our other selves
in our other skins
something different
from what came before
we are or we are not, perhaps,
a new kind of being
with a little of this
and something of that
a rod for an arm
an eye replaced by glass
not quite anything
you’ve come to know
we are the ambiguous ones
designed, not born,
assigned to re-create the world
as something-or-other
but not the one you knew.