Earthen Well

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Even the stars seem burned out, greenly ill.
Desert roads fall into a filling well
where streams choke on brontosaurus bones
brittle as dust, as history.

Beyond tunnel vision, the eye of a needle opens:
Serpent jaws crack the bad egg of me.
In a new solution I'm light liquid now,
my weight on new scales barely shifting the tides,
even as I harden into fossil stone,
the heart ground down into meal.

Above my extinction the surface eye clearing
where mockingbirds flutter in the spring bath,
whistling a greening song to wiggling road:
a lure from the whole we're in.
For them, too, the cobra's jaws grind,
hiss them a song of bone and feather.

Somehow higher than we, the pecking orders
fall from hunger, we from greed.
Our common mother Earth gangrened, a sick Medusa,
her coiled roads, rivers, lightning,
nerves on end
are ready to strike, digest, reclaim,
restitch her cloudy body gown:
the bloody rags, the vital organs.