Poem – The Calendar (By David Russell)

The Calendar

The sun coughed, scattered itself for a split second into myriad droplets – so divided, poured itself into the central chasm, flattening it to glory, clinching the final resilience of the chasm’s rocks – that reject sediment, so newly refined. Its roughage thickened the barriers against itself.

In the beginning of time was its end, finally clinched to the mind of the wanton, omnivorous plunderer. Now the looters are satiated; the Goddesses have taken over – the male element has been pared down to its quintessence – a select few hundred, confined to a stud farm on the site of an ancient priestly precinct, left to run wild (under surveillance) at all times save those of semen harvesting. Given that there are billions of sperm per individual, the principle of parsimony rules. At any sign of dilution or degeneration, short-term strategies of replenishment and revitalization have been pre-programmed.

But any suppressed, defeated tribe is always potential for new power. Theirs is the love, ours is the guilt; they are the focus for our conscience. So the sisters are alerted; they need some simulation of old, discarded ritual to keep themselves together. And so they stepped back, through prehistory, following in reverse the development of all inventions, all innovations, into the wombs of their sources. To cap all excavation, they cultivated the ultimate asbestos, and penetrated the core of fire. And the circle is stifled in completeness.

*  *

The snake and the condor clinched; the snake had the lesser mobility of the two, but held the fluid of extinction and its vital duct. The snake seized the condor as it poised to take flight – stifled it, swallowed it, absorbed and applied its wings, took to all air – But its eyes dropped out, to grow as kernels of inner light. Each eye stood distinct, each a jewel of the inner fire: fire and light fed each other.

*  *

Now they were poised to start again, while the sterile border guards yearned with their routines, primed fingers soothing anxious triggers and grenade pins, whose function was meant to be ever suspended. The seeds exploded first, and multiplied at random. The explosions thus catalysed forged new conduits of multiplication, through which only one seed could find itself – all its likes were annihilated. Through those conduits new species evolved at random, answering the comforting and threatening signals from the elements.

The life of the seeds resonated through the days and years; the earth went on nodding shakily in response to the sun’s breath. It was defined only through fleeting night, known only through partial blindness. Heat thrust and shrank as a true flame, feeling no obligation to time or orbits. Then came the calendar, its essence long preceding its first inscription. The elements followed the calendar before the calendar was known. The partial blindness receded. The calendar drew on the elements as a source for its inscriptions, its figures paralleling and transcending cells.

Something, somewhere, long transposed through many layers, could at last be seen by eyes reopened and revived, through the last unbroken shafts.

Rang’s people, graven with the last words, held final sway – for they had battled with the black dragon of the unseen, filled its quicksand fire with rock, and harnessed it to their own periphery. They had taken the universe captive, made the absolute calendar, the span of first and last, for they were the first to know the zero, the nothing, the suspension of counting. Through the orbit of suspension, or shadowed existence, they forestalled all their aspiring conquerors. For everything – living and dead, they have a place in the circle of totality – a straight link with every beam from all stars visible and one sun known. But the total circle consisted of two circles, which overlapped, as did the most certain days. There were some days that had no name, and those days were cursed. But their certainty matched that of the overlapping named days.

They had seen the star symbol of the calendar in prime time past, flashing back far beyond the origins of humanity, when the groaning and shrugging of the earth, faulted all edges and sea beds, stretched scrawny the neck of ocean that had for aeons held countless species in terror, forcing them forever to outflank their pursuers, but never allowing a full escape. For the dragon strained forever at its contorted extremity, greedy to devour the core, giving Rang’s rejects of old an ever-kindling fire. But the sea-neck dwindled, until they could see their way across it with their frail dug-outs. The new land was sheeted in ice, bare of humanity. But those rejects carried with them fire and ingenuity, and knew they would penetrate the heart of this new land. Pestilence and invaders withered them through time, but they retained their resilience through absorbing the essence of their foes. Through tempering shone total light.

Their descendants melted into their ancestors, unblocked by birth-pangs and death-throes, treading their pilgrimage around the rings. The trek was eternal, though their numbers shrank towards a solitary point, withered and perished from a unicellular organism, which cursed and gibed at them – a mirror shaft of transferred pain. Through balded scrubland, walls rose and crumbled. The soft edges of perfect, blended stones sank to enrich their brother soil, heralding the sweep of the last waters. Through decomposition reared the ideal form. Plastic, the lava spilled around them. The greater fire, fire of the overlapping light – fed on the black flames.

Crude warriors, decked in treasures seemingly plundered from the Gods, including plumage aloft had hacked through the rejects’ fastnesses, bleached pure flint blades with the white heat of light. They scattered sparse seeds, bowed to the sun, and yawned their departure – leaving thin, scorching trails. The sun-children followed them, greedy for their Gods’ bounty. They flouted old temples, but brought tinted metals closer to the Gods’ ornaments – modeling Gods’ wings from bird-thoughts , litters from chief-thoughts and wound-thoughts.

After them came the giants, thick-hided, battering through their moving, cut circles – making all days, months, years spin through them in a few short breaths –  their acolytes with goblets of shrouded eyes, snatching flashes of flowers and wings.

Then came the last ones, leaner, bearers of the finest gold caskets, drawing up the cicada’s chirrup from its happy depths. They worked on sand and bleak, mellowed stone, spread out quickly the shelves of burial, stood aloft – their piped, tubed circles drawing all to their greater eyes – before their final loads dropped into the great beyond. Above them clouds swelled, as from rotting trees; the sky stood sickly awash.

Yet the growth of all their greatest orbits stopped at the calendar, at the distillation of all circles. And one ringed with a perfect mouth felt all the awe and terror of the man-gods. The dragon’s bit was like strained sinew.

The smallest life forms had gathered round to consume their essence. Even the lowest carrion feeders have the right to nourishment. Within the calendar are all insects, trees, shrubs, roots and grasses – which send the greatest and smallest form to sleep and shell, crumpling all hides, folding up the prime mountains of vision.

Let calcium lines be shaved of moss, re-score all patterns. Those who change and slither shall live; those who clinch every root shall perish. In the circle all is death. Total circumscription by the circle radiates  death; through straight lines, life persists – but not without angles, not without the clinch of segmentation. And the knowledge of angles has its source in the circle. So lines and circles are forever enmeshed. At each knowing of mesh all lines are circled upon themselves. Obliterating all ends – for lines unthreaded are the most fragile of all.

Temples of knowledge rose from the splitting and grinding of a gamut of matter and observations. Through minuscule fractions they amassed answers. But through thick masses, the pestilence of blindness spreads. So the temples lost some eyes through blanked chambers. For light is massive; light is heavy, light must ever pare. Only through the greatest fissures can it find its guidelines. The sacred seams can only be traced from points of no starting.

Liquid flow and organic growth must follow light. The herbal balm seeps through all mankind, fit for a single, universal cataract but fully dispersed – straddling generations with the intersections of its thoughts.

One arrow and three spears quivered on the walls of the field laboratory, bouncing many omens back to their sources. In fronded pain the hut took fine gall – a ring of ashes for calamity’s brakes, resplendent ever – tarpaulins ripped to zero functioning. Protective clotting – well-ignited, threadbare it blew, blitzing a fork with gold-dust tail, rending flint and plastic shrapnel down the bleached chasm – unbolstered flotsam now, all grew. 

Toiling to make irrigation eternal, they ditched forever. Raised once through the blowpipe, up sheer to the star-arrow, down to the spade and mattock, right to the chained, giant jaw – wiping all down, all they smirched. They swallowed light, followed light whilst struggling to build walls against it.

**

One now screwed up time pieces, straddling all ages. Constant rendezvous were to be sustained across modular time-warps.

Rang scanned stench-bloated bubbles, bursting to flap their jagged, scummy skins, belching their abrasive haze. All the world of speedy glitter had elbowed off its droppings into this forsaken land. In time of carelessness past the wantons had picked all clean, laid all bare. Now, starved in spirit of their dream-past, and loathing the elusive, they trickled everything over with a callous sentiment. The insects, the all-resilient, mated, hatched and buzzed through all. They relished the finality of their shells, denied to most vertebrates.

The inmates were growing restless, getting demoralized – which threatened to jeopardize their fertility, and call for the importation of greater numbers. That could not be: there had to be a hand-picked moral liaison squad to sustain vitality. This elite lived in luxury on another reservation, separated from the fertilizers. Though they had greater freedom than the latter, they were still under the eyes and cameras of the border guards – who were called the Amazon Legion, revered but partly outcast from the Central Matriarchy. But blind eyes were turned to clandestine fraternization between the legion and the liaison squad: it was recognized that sound morale helped to sustain the newborn, everlasting order.

**

John, hard but ever-trusted, was the pride of the legion. He dreamed of a total change, but realized that he must bide his time, continuing to function until perhaps a change could bring itself on. In the scope of their restrictive glare, the guards always respected him.

So much of life is abrasive waiting, he thought. Disgusted, he poured a half-empty pitcher of spirit on the sludge. As the wind blew well away from him, he set light to it. Flames and fumes, shrieking red and yellow, flanked by gallery-black, roared up, as if in perverted gratitude. For precious seconds, the spectrum’s extremes loomed – equal in outline. But then the black took over. Beneath it churned pythons of excremental ash. There perished many flies, but through speeded hatching, smothering gluts of yet more living ones blew up numbers,  swamped the bulk of the deceased. Old shields and bracelets shone on through constant polishing. Slimed up but solidly embedded, the records of broken powers stood extant before him. His counter ticked, for here – fully contaminated, was the treasury of the new energy, matching all the blown, abandoned old one.

He waded on – as hunter, fisherman, paddyfield farmer, swilled throughout by the morass. He pursued these activities singly, independently, parallel to the mass but oblivious of it. He went on to tame all floods by terracing the hillsides, curling them, banking them to peace. Teething inspirations lacerated him as seven grimed clouds grinned down through suggested jaws. Pure air spirit stood at his buttoned beck and call. Now gelignite lay sleeping; were there now new bodies to lay over desert bones? Would multitudes now float in coracles of ribbed plastic? Would virgin cries, greedily sought, suck all down into their still-blocked galleries?

*

A lusterless canister, ejected from a shuttle, swayed with its parachute and plopped into the middle – there to float – a futile, drifting watchtower.

Would the new tribes now bulldoze layers of sand, to try and soothe the last lava?

Would the new blood of the next two interchangeable sides now redden the grey-brown mass, jeering at Mars’ eye-flushed surface? Would all the glittering toys of war now find consummation here, in heroic wreckage, in anticipation of some celebratory aftermath?

Knowledge of the dragon had grown dim and faced. From now on it was ever harder to know who was who.

Whatever might happen, John had no need to worry. His supply of things of earth would easily cover his lifetime – maybe, with a mind and a will, carry him beyond it. For he had been vaccinated by oblivion, turned to leading vision’s torment through all interstices.

 

But he had lost the date, lost the time, lost all direction, all thought of the calendar.

Yet even the mess could reflect the remotest light, and swish its jostling accompanying solids to parody a melody. And in that latent parody was a clear vision of its butt. The scale gained solidity, braced firmly its intervals

Even through the matted mist there shone new life blood. Cartwheels John turned, gloved in springy hide, replaying all past wrongs. He, the psychic filter, banished to this mission of void. His heartbeats replayed messages in subdued rhythms – three messages an hour. Above him flowed vapour trails. He was to slide forever along the measuring knives, matted thoughts away, refracting sediment along.

They drew, they cut the blocks at white heat. But the power of their exertions came from beyond them. Burning rocks and liquid potions cut bold colour into slabs, and joined physically all images of things elsewhere linked by only air, earth or flame. Then through their blocks, between them and around them – the slabs of danger, consonant with the sun’s submergence. Each curve and loop mirrored the sun’s rise and fall, divorced from its zenith.

In the beginning was the end-point of progress, the boundary of the brain; whether or not this is attributed to another planet, another system, is finally immaterial, for all is only known through being thrown back in reflection. Since so much of our destiny hinges on a periphery, we could ourselves be what lies beyond it.

The calendar orbited all thoughts, all implementations, preceded all sense, engendered all things of life and energy, all things of still substance. In a blank instant was each generation. But the gods had grown weary. Their exhaustion suffused all creatures, with no dilution of its centre. Only man’s, Rang’s, central ring froze and stored energy. Now it was for man, for Rang, to stretch eternal life through overlapping mortal generations – to nurture a seed in every day, every date – to swell and multiply each instant to keep the sea-beds fluid, to sever, to coagulate – oscillating between the contrary demands of growth. It was for Rang’s people to draw up all minds’ eyes to the lofty fullness of vision, so that the lines, square, circles and obelisks of order should multiply – to embrace the instants, pack them into understanding, final clarity through a forced mass.

The calendar presaged the compass, as the world wallowed on Mercury, unnerved – and in turn unnerving its vital liquidity. The first needles were tightly bound, for motion raged unabated beneath them. Revenge sprang a trap of clarity. Resurrections abounded in tortured effigy. Now, less flexed than birds but nearing their flying grace, gliders blaze the trail of searching, stringing impulses, straining after star-lines. Mercury is the great cleanser, the element that staved off one of the great curses. But all mankind tripped, for it dispersed all footings, fractured every arc, to find the centres of awe. Saltpetre roared its constant undercurrent, forging a major triad.

*

Through the headphones, in the bowels of the engines, all living voices were mimicked and echoed, muted – blasted with amplification to the utmost degree – for the dial was round, and had the strength to shake the skin between sound and touch, and make all senses tremble. The recorder drew all in, feasted on its strength, ranched all living forms to sate its greed for energy. Its belching rumbles provoked the elements, even forced massed flies into formation, bled them to the forms of blades and stakes.

The toilers strove both upwards and downwards to reach the source of light. Both directions pulled; each one drew the other to stasis. In the gleaming, slithery galleries, light turned itself through abrasive touch to meet the extremes of heat and cold. Withdrawing its essence, it thickened its power, making the multitudes as iron filings to its lodestone. Their slumped forward heads, their crouched, hunched bodies brushed some roots’ bottoms, then lurched beyond the moss to dry points and edges.

Some delved half-way to quarries, open galleries richly flooded. Some hauled great stones onto rolling logs – to thrust into mighty towers, and into the great calendar. Awesome splendours reared through thongs of exhaustion and torn muscles, routed through mass graves.

The edges of Rang’s eyes were the edges of his realm – that crater gift from the Gods. The realm made all horizons. And the horizons were all his people’s breath – bloated to bold elevation. The horizons wobbled between solid, liquid and gas; they embraced all growth and shrinkage. The horizons circled the soil, topped up the rivers, then cut back the lush fertility, giving unrestricted rein to the harsh sand.

*

Vaulted vats liquefied all solids, to sustain the toiling slaves, feed unbroken the pulsing of massed, tied muscle. Naked to the outside air, waters and slime coagulated in a mass birth of all living forms.  A whipped thought world skeined broadly well. Harsh welts ribbed forth new flames’ suggestions, taking a back-hander to carnal know-how. So the ultimate seeds, the resilient seeds found their bedrock, twisted force to light, shivered through radial vapour, clamped to all blisters in horror. Anodes, cathodes gild all crannies. The cottonmouth snake rose, turned into an invisible rope, tormenting the universe on its margin – grinding all into a serrated pulp for all to be in.

Flint and obsidian chipping met the final reactor. Great awe paralleled the sighting of the first spark, the first star on earth, and sustained its parallel with the last. Whosoever touches the perimeter of the circle shall enter the realm of reversible generations. The offspring shall beget the parents. In the beginning was the end-point of progress, the boundary of the brain. Whether or not this can finally be attributed to another planet, another system, is finally immaterial – because all that is known exists through being thrown back in reflection.

Burning rocks and searing potions cut bold colour into slabs, and joined all images of things elsewhere linked only by air and flames. Before ice and sea, before swamp and fire scattered the split, warring tribes. Some splinters sank into misted lakes. Other barbed points seethe, turbulent in the scorching sand, alongside the hardest lizards. Dispersal was sustained for aeons – then plague and storm drove all to valley’s bottom, sinking all hatreds into earth, to be the earth’s ballast. The boulders which had scowled , cracked and rolled, tortured by ice and flame, to menace all on inclines, were now fused into the columns of their new-found dignity, through total edges emulating their old mass, once one – primal proud. The valley swamps turned deeper, or half-dried for total plenty. But afar, the wails of eagles and condors echoed the winds, and made the tasks go on, over the heads of their executors.

In the ages before their withering, the swamp reeds whistled warnings – that the glaciers would be transformed into scalding clouds, and that the locusts would carry the plague to all mankind, turn skins to cinders. The few who could escape had to build the new order.

Quetzals and peacocks glinted, with a predominance of green and purple. Buzzards homed in on their vicinity as they plunged ever deeper into heat and damp. Their plumage hardened into translucency as it brightened in colour, throwing back the sun, filtered and unfiltered, through its all-immersed smoothness. The wings became statues, then grew into another calendar. Pumas made their dreaded descent – their sure paws holding their lightness, forever buoyant – but hardening beyond the wings, their claws and teeth toughening to opaque resilience – their feet finally blocked by the statues, clinched at the calendar.

In the armadillo was one god, shell and spine fused. The snakes wrestled through scales old and new, modulated translucency and opacity. They grew to be the calendar’s lidless eyes. The insects sped up their wings – beyond the reach of human eye and ear. They, the lowest, the most volatile, grew to be the highest – the calendar’s full span, its mind.

Berries’ stains were imprinted indelibly on crushed reeds. Sap swelled to sinewy strength. Through their flight from glacier and blizzard, birds’ migrations arched, dipped, both paralleled and intersected.

*

The new sages nurtured the old records, including those of the Creation:

Through the first friction of its birth, the world was clouded, the thread of fire undulated, forever uncut. Through the thickest fogs it was borne, ever quivering from perpetual renewal –because  loops of sun and moon, thickened and superimposed, or cancelled on repetition according to caprice, sustained it. Through the thickest fogs it was borne, ever-quivering to endless renewal. Within it, blood, ore, lava and blinding sun wrestled in harmony, quavered as winged snakes. Its offshoots filtered into a cowl – to thicken a temperate gauze. The cutting edges were forged, firstly by friction and lastly by flame.

 

On clotted, marinated ideals, swelling ropes plunge forward. In waves, the world shone clear, its every colour fed back to flood a whole range of jewels. These stones, so gorged, assumed a total optical power, which channeled and invigorated all trembling, feeding these into the brains of Rang’s tribe. Terrestrial breaths in unison sustained the buoyancy of what had been calmed.

The matriarchs nod approval, ponder decisions, yawning through pillars of smoke, signaling all series. It is for them both to halt and to deflect the menacing currents. But now the tribe is split through their ruthless tenacity. The ceremonies of fertility and destruction, ever akin, are fused in the unique calendar. Each wave of conquerors suppressed the ceremony – but in doing so, all absorbed it, so that it became integral to them.

The unseen blast cast the final shadow. The sun leered flatly, a parasite upon pain. The calendar grew roots, deepened – its interlacing signs coming ever nearer to the intricacies of living cells beyond sight. The ash-slaked soil crumbled, to blind and choke those it had nurtured as a slave. Now there was mass flight from the undampened flames, a thirst for pastures – old, beyond planting. But in those remote pastures were stings, sharper than any dust – points loosed from their users.

Tiny geysers pricked the sand in piercing delicacy. Their spray arched back knowingly.

Each dividing line in the calendar crosses death. Both with and without its segments, it mirrors all foresight of doom. When segments seem cracked, there can be a vent for the shafts of beyond – not so when the mirror is clouded with laughter.

*

Now was the time for the great peace offerings. The sages had to know the body intact before they could separate veins and nerves. They knew the strengths and stress resistance of all the wires, before having any thought of turning twigs to metal. They called a halt in order to initiate motion.

But the circle blurred its segments and stifled itself through its own completeness. Through the stifling came the inner war, the segmenting of people, the desperate struggle for the sources of flow. Through a wink of the sun, through the cowering of a cloud, the edges and points of buildings turned to the goals of mutilation. But the calendar stayed, though deadened by human blindness. Then came the growth, to blur its surface, as the segments had been blurred. Growth and calendar fed each other.

The moment of infusion flashed in, obliterating all blinks. Stentorian silence held its crucial pause. The tubed flow found all erect, standing illumined. It pollinated the flowers.  – and so grew more flowers, with pointers making living dials, vibrating from every particle involved in their growth. Mind blossomed, alight with seeming blackness, between petals, on the edge of every petal . . . numbers are living entities, the corporeal fused with spirit.

Wound by the sun, the calendar dug down into the earth, acquiring earth-crust muscle which came to match the strength of its original substance. And so began the subsidence, so organic growth thrust through the calendar’s ribs. So ribs of lead demarcated shafted separations of glass, to make eye-music shine.

But then the excavators discovered the calendar and claimed it for their own, taking its boundaries to be their chart of the world. Roots and enriching soil curled around its lines.

So the curve was welded to the line, the shaft the below – then and ever after. Every letter is a deep incision; it both halts and repairs growth. The stains of its ink suffuse all surfaces with the deep essence of intuition. Drying ink shrivels all dross.

The one calendar was two calendars – of one and all, of God and Man. It trapped time’s flight around its orbit, channeled its fugitive energy into a core of knowledge. Within its grasp, the day, the month, the year before became the day, the month, the year behind – self-mirroring and cleared of smoke. For a long time two was one. But the two calendars came apart as the Gods tugged at the circle to appropriate it to themselves. But there was only one circle, greater than the Gods, so only its shade could be wrenched obliquely. But the Gods were muscular, the wrench was strong, and the obliquity dislocated the whole earth.

The counting priests knew the wrench was not ended – even when the great star arcs again looked into the calendar. It could have gone deep, submerged, to hold itself in a deathly lull until it could reassert itself from its own full depth, and split the earth’s skin beneath the calendar’s base. Only the concerted will of the generic human mind could counteract this final peril.

So there came sixteen priest-counters, their numbers spawned by the calendar. Each priest touched the great circumference. Anointed with the digits, they walked on two by two, where the hook smoothed out into the horizontal. They found that many man days had slipped before and behind the god days. These they had pushed forward and backward through the power of the sacred two. Logs and mattocks were fortified by this ceremony.

*

All the world’s winged creatures drew themselves into a dense mass, raging for final satiation, their last gesture to cancel all that would follow. But in the cancellation was the renewal. They would devour all the burrowers to build up their final energy reserve. Yet alertness shoots every nerve – fuses missile and thong.

The fliers and the burrowers made parallel full circles, drowned in their final meeting. Each were pulled towards the fire – the fire burrowed under and flown over, the sun – without and within. At last they touched, to answer the sun’s explosions. Then there came a mass of new species – evolved through delving, evolved through soaring.

All before, all after, all that shall be deemed to precede or follow, stems from the calendar. But the centre of the calendar eludes all physical approaches. All names and determinations grope for their stimuli, finally never touching. All approaches shall finally turn back on themselves – for the calendar takes precedence over all lines –because lines stem from approaches. The calendar loops and coils all lines, taking them beyond prophecy, making them supra-sensory.

The chip was blasted into the rock, sealed with a granite shaft. The rock was opaque now to all save the final ray. It imposed halts; and those halts were the cores of deepest meaning to those who were distressed by them. They drew all apprehensions, all feelings of ecstasy, panic and hopelessness into a pool of equalized sensation – skimming the boundaries of satisfaction and boredom, before those states faded into heights and depths beyond themselves.

The earth’s heart forced its fluids to clot, into solidities so dense that they could be engraved. A sense of the future comes with high pressures; a sense of the past comes from low pressure. But within a full circle all terms are reversed. Ideally, with the past at high pressure, potential future repetitions of eclipses and earthquakes shall be shrunk into tranquility. Their recurrence shall be all their own – inflated by no spurious comparisons. The arrest from above, the arrest from below, shall be as one. Living calm shall emerge from the arrest; the revulsion it provokes shall be truly centrifugal. So it is with the calendar, abrasively flashing its power to pressurize.

On it all thoughts are laminated, as it crumbles within an orbit of evasive reverence, as it is furtively restored by those who are magnetized by doubt – a palimpsest void of erasure. Earth comes to itself, from itself, by dint of the calendar’s self-retraction. The retraction precedes self, as orbits precede planetary cooling. Then the retraction is embraced and absorbed – it grows into a replica circle through new motion, and can eclipse itself at wil

All attacks, on and among species, are attacks on the calendar.

 

Author Bio:

David Russell was born in 1940. Resident in the UK. Writer of poetry, literary criticism, speculative fiction and romance. Main poetry collection Prickling Counterpoints (1998); poems published in online International Times. Main speculative works High Wired On (2002); Rock Bottom (2005). Translation of Spanish epic La Araucana, Amazon 2013. Romances: Self’s Blossom; Explorations; Further Explorations; Therapy Rapture; Darlene, An Ecstatic Rendezvous (all pub Extasy (Devine Destinies). Singer-songwriter/guitarist. Main CD albums Bacteria Shrapnel and Kaleidoscope Concentrate. Many tracks on You Tube.



This poem is part of the complete collection; Speculum: Collected Poetry and Prose, by David Russell.

View or Download the complete collection here in PDF format.

Follow David Russell on Amazon: Click Here.