PROVIDENCE

The horse-drawn sedans come to pieces on the plains, nothing left but yoke and fender. They’re following rumor of a place where beads and bottle caps are legal tender. The enshrined fuselage of a passenger jet, its nose broken like the Sphinx, points the bicycle gangs and nomadic priests to a road paved with mismatched bricks. It winds between the gallows and the squat, anemic trees, amidst barbed wire topiaries and scrap-iron chevaux-de-frise, into a tube of chain-link that ends before a door made of overlapping car hoods, a fish-scale gate that clatters as it’s opened. Facades obscured in haze, dust kicked up by jinrickshas and running children. The pastor stares each stranger down from his crow’s nest on the steeple. The sheriff’s got one eye left, and he’s keeping it on you. The gun smith swaps the lens out of his monocle for iron sights. The judge points to a plaque: Be a Good Boy, or Be a Good Shot. Don’t Misbehave, or Don’t Miss. The bartender will gladly douse your liver ‘til you piss it out. The barber has the whooping cough, and he’s giving it to you. Respect the coffin maker; he’s the tycoon of the town. He knows carpentry will thrive wherever cancer can be found. Salute the greenhouse keeper as she sews her alchemy. Thanks to her your gums ain’t bleeding, ‘cause an apple a week puts a luster on your cheek. Old men say the providence of wastelands was brinkmanship. Living in junkyards, learning a trade fashioning horseshoes from hand grenades. Sallow the fields that lie fallow, the stubborn soil hallowed, the smell of wheat, golden the waist-high sea. The harvest is meager, but the darkest days are over, and famine’s an old wives’ tale murmured as we say grace. Still the caravans creep like trails of ants from a backdrop of evening fire, full of fools who refuse to believe that the sun never sets on the finished empire. And the drifters come with their bindlestiffs and spurs on their combat boots, for they’ve heard of a place where the Geiger-count’s low and the orchards are littered with fruit. Poor souls who’ve traveled for unnumbered days, dark figures growing distinct under the blaze. Providence waits for them.


THE OLD WORLD

SANDLAND

Canteens leaking steam. Sweat pores clogged with salt. Flies swarm the reedy quicksand, blacken our oasis. Reservoirs echo bleakly. Faucets retch up tubes of clay. The pail strikes dirt at the bottom of the well. Scorpions, you know, have made their castles in the cattle skulls, but what have we to show for ingenuity? Plastic sheets in giant funnels, moisture traps of tarpaulin. The condensation vanishes, licked off by the wind. No more April showers now--just virga wisps: not enough to irrigate the cracks on your lips. The rain that falls but never lands: not enough to irrigate the cracks on your hands. More valuable than veins of gold, a secret mountain spring. A tiny trickle from the rocks--we'd kill for such a thing. Vultures swoop and try to scalp us, beak-and-talon target practice, as we skin ourselves on barbs, ripping up a greedy cactus. If your throat dries shut and your mouth dries open, can you still pretend the sky is an ocean? To weep is to waste so horde your tears like pearls, or watch them evaporate before your very eyes. Let your gourd roll down the dune, for your loins drain every drink. The sandland is broader than a lifetime, and you'll spend yours searching for the brink. The mirage makes another wavering promise. We walk for a shore that never comes. The sandland is broader than a lifetime, and you'll spend yours shouldering the sun.

THISTLEEDEN

Her hanging gardens waved farewell
Flower curtains swaying
Her proud and handsome avenues
Age-old vistas yielding
Her causeway sloping to the ground
A wing extending freedom
Her white-capped domes an orrery
Of five half-moons receding

At last we're going home again
To distant Thistleeden
We'll never leave her walls again
They'll flourish horns in Thistleeden

Her meadows fainted on our hips
Silken grasses sighing
Her far lakes shuddered one by one
We could not bear to leave them
A playful brook caught up with us
And followed with abandon
Until it found the way too long
And circled back home whimpering

At last we're going home again
To distant Thistleeden
We'll never leave her walls again
They'll bury us in Thistleeden

The stars closed in and crowded her
Brushed her brass gates golden
The hills piled up and covered her
Coral towers hidden
A glow of lamps blushed on the clouds
Like a dream forbidden
As we retrace our errant steps
The glow warms us within

At last we're going home again
To distant Thistleeden
We'll never leave her walls again
They'll wreathe our necks in Thistleeden

The crooked road outruns us
It lengthens like a crack
It chews us up feet-first
Saves our memories for last
The jagged road ferocious
Grinds away the flesh
Blurry eyes and swollen hearts
All that's left

At last we're going home again
To distant Thistleeden
We'll never leave her walls again
They'll carry us in Thistleeden

MISKATONIA

Slime-coated Cyclopean ruins
Jut into the dreams of men
What geometry rises through rags of mist—
Corners tangled, chaotic angles
Siren lulls curdle blood
Sermons pronounced like the gargles of the dying
Men gag on names from the dawn of language
Prehistoric, asyllabic
Names known to alienists
Scribbled on asylum walls
Known to archeologists
Blasphemies in cuneiform
Whispers in Inuit and Arabic
That drive men frantic to the Atlantic
To old New England's coast
Where towns have huddled for centuries
On ground honeycombed by catacombs
Inner seas
Lap the hollows of the earth
Thick, black waves, crude as oil
Leap and boil
Eyeless fish announce their lord
Flopping on the phosphorescent shore
Plunge and soar
Death-fires cast a sick, green pall
Verdigris in the vaulted deeps
Field of bones
Around a mountain, crust like snow
Growing as men’s graveyards grow
Ceremonies held in cemeteries by the new moon
High priest reads the names off unmarked tombs
Exotic chapels stare down on the harbor from a hill
Villagers flare
Their inbred albino eyes
And hidden gills at strangers
Folk who snoop near the chapel are never seen again
They chime midnight with two lungfuls of horror
Their screams float out to sea, to the Devil’s Reef
Where orca-skinned humanoids slip back under the waves
Worm-eaten pages crumble to dust at a touch
Scorch-marks and blood stains and candle wax riddle the ink
Dread incantations, formulas fatal to flesh
Claw at the fabric between what is here—
What is beyond...
Formless larvae
Paw and flounder
Gnaw and gibber
Pipes in the pulsing void
Test tubes, beakers in laboratories all but burst
A blast of sulfur harbingers the very worst
Science meeting sorcery more than halfway
Rushing headlong
Into widening eldritch gulfs
To the end of days
For now the stars are not yet right, but they are far from wrong
Sliding like pins in a giant cosmic lock
Stirring in their lairs, those that outlast death
Patient, hungry, they wait for their doors to yawn open
Stone doors yawn in the dreams of artists and mad men
Stone doors yawning…

THE KINGDOM OF TOOTH AND CLAW

Alack the day, your roofs are blown away
Your fences can’t keep predators at bay
By roots and boughs your masonry undone
Weeds to woods, the brambles block the sun

As sure as day, your roads will fade away
The moss and rain will hasten their decay
Trampled under hoof, your cobblestone
Buried in the thickets overgrown

The lame, the lost are dutifully waylaid
At once the birds and flies join in the fray
And tooth and claw and rivers flood and run
And dog eat dog, as dogs have always done

Where the ocean will not end
The forest will not clear
The mountain will not move

The desert will not end
The cavern will not breach
The mountain will not move