1.
They fit crooked ladders up through holes cut in earthen plane, and plant black crooks in sod by night. What do they think will flower?
They finger barbed stars, each standing in high-heel boots to better look the part of the giant. These women and men go hooded and muffled—and though colonied, strongly decline to act as ants do, heaving their own crooked ladders, aiming them high. Notice a shuddering fellow, though, sick in his occluded burrow. Man with a name, though a half-disject one—his black thumbs rest on packed red burrow. Black thumbs of his peer from a cut hole; he inquires. “A ladder up here, if you will! A ladder up here!”
2.
A black sky hardly counts as black when colored so with yellow thunder. The cowering people who lodge in the hill curse at these strokes, see them as useless heat-rung ladders. Whereas people who live in shallow burrows curse them for jute ropes too rough; and the people who sleep on the plain only know to roll from their way as they drive to the pitted earth. To such simple, mithering sorts all externals are only implements.
These natives trade in filthy means, becoming by degrees the most luxuriate, toothy devils you could conceive—shaking, mugging, malingering, spooning in wet straw beds, licking the sides of boiling cookware for a hasty cure. They tear at boils and growths with a feldspar—and then with the same greased spar will chop at a spry girl’s hair.
Their love is a devilry and a raillery, plain as a pigeon killed with thrown shafts—plain as as the ashen blocks they’ll push from lufty jaggled promontories. They care not for dessicate shrews, nor for saguaro lobes, nor significant-featured stones too weighty to operate; only for their forty thousand enumerated renditions of one same circle-dance.
3.
Their blackened crooks are sunflower stalks. (They can, of course, only be made to grow sunflowers again.) These dwellers, they gather their garden-plots as octopi do (to as much discerned purpose). They have crackery, crocks, nuts and dark seeds, faulty tacks and and muslin screens, pendants and hole-punched shells. They apply an invoked fire to arrangements, and sweep as they go; the shrivel they’re left with is the initial black crook, that occult sunflower stalk.
-2004
