Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer
There's a face I see in the wells, sits
like a crow on my shoulder. Home-sick
and sick of home, these small fires
I tread -- the way these strangers
build their walls, and the unfamiliar flies.
Stopping to sleep, I dream the bare song
under my heels: of the rising before dawn,
the ashes dead in the grate, and the town
rolling away at my feet. In the morning
the black trees have vanished from the field.
I walk the dry hand of the earth and in that oven
burn away my name and the place that I was born.
from Christina the Astonishing,
co-written with Lesley Saunders,
with monoprints by Peter Hay
(pub. Two Rivers Press, 1998)