Where the leafless thorntrees fork
like black lightning the voices are lost
in the chute of grey glassy water
bursting into white on the hard muscle

of boulders. He points to the brown pool,
the slow eddies of foam. Her breast
is bare. The hound chews a rear paw.

The sunlight burns from the dust
tinting the underside of fractured
tree limbs with a fleshy amber. I see
her smile, his drowned-out laughter,

the twitching of the dog, the spilled
milk of the waterfall. I am waiting
for the indecency of a saxophone.

And at last the disconsolate wail
zigzags down from the sunlit ruins
on the cliff's edge, dodging the spray,
birdlike. And the brown and gold

scrim of the landscape rolls upward
like a blind, the deafening sostenuto
of the water now diminuendo . The lovers
are revealed spotlit in all the simplicity

of metallic body-stockings, he silver
and she copper with wild hair of golden
wire. Their braided voices sink

from high-pitched inaudibility, and I
grovel on the spotlit boards, biting at
the itch that I was born to bite.