Cold Fates
When the pale sun whelps sundogs,
heraldic blazon of Jack Frost,
and the fallen leaves still burn with dead light,
the fates weave cloth of snow,
a hush of rosaries rotating in the loom,
crystal scissors cutting choirs
of angels out of numb air—
Breath deep,
take in the holocaust
of dawn in late autumn.
Take the ember on your tongue,
suck the icy marrow:
By this sacrament
be unhouseled,
unshriven.
When the expelled breath hangs
like a white torch
over a burnt offering
the cold fates can hear you speak.
Selah. Let us pray.
Clotho
From neutrinos,
infinidesimal ghosts
of unredeemed tears
sleeting through all matter,
every cubic micron
of our everloving flesh,
to galaxies,
huge bright ladies
wheeling in entropic cotillion,
it all
hangs from her thread
and spins.
This spinster is not old;
she is not young.
This moira is before memory,
before all the daughters,
before all our praises,
stomped out in a circle of dust,
scribed in moons on bone,
smudged in sigils of red ocher,
the hand bespoke to clay or stone,
before Gilgamesh
tamed Enkidu,
before the whore,
before all the murder,
before rape
before history,
before the prophets,
with their killer alphabets
and scrolls of begats
Clotho's spindle turned
turns
and will turn.
Drawn from this distaff, "such stuff
as dreams are made on...",
We dance as fast as we can,
like dervishes belaboring the beloved
with the flare and flourish
of our skirts.
But she is before music,
before rhythm,
before the beat of our hearts.
Clotho works in the silence
before silence, before the sirens sang,
before the muses spoke.
Mute Clotho smiles
the archaic sickle
Greek sculptors chiseled
on all statues
until their hands
learned to carve mouths
not curved
to the arc
of this unhuman mirth.
An enigma twisting
a thread of mystery
from the tangle of chaos
until the last trio
of quarks decays
into improbability...
In the silence
of the muses
her hands are busy.
Lachesis
Half past love’s labor lost
on a melting watch’s
persistent memory,
half past the half life
of the lithium chorus
singing out the lauds and matins
like a bach fugue
played on water harmonica
and glockenspiel,
Lachesis measures out the bolt
laced like a suture
through the wounded heart—
a live wire—
thread of lightning
whipcracking the air
from the coil
to Tesla’s outstretched hand
as he allows his body
to be crucified by light
in this passion play
of Dr. Electric.
“therefore I will wail and howl,
I will go stripped and naked:
I will make a wailing
like the dragons,
and mourning as the owls”
Atropos
The snick
of her scissors
shocks all beholding
with the same evil beauty
as the hammer cock
of a well-oiled pistol.
All my griefs hiss
in the soft tissue of my brain
like sparks
from lightning struck power lines
raining down
on wet pavement.
Like an old bluesman
blowing his harp,
wailing his lowdown gospel
to the broken promise
of everyone and everybody
he ever loved--
I hold the crumbling wafer
of the word
that was flesh
close to my mouth
and try to curse the life
back into it.
Dana Pattillo
