Nicole's "gathering" exercise

(I wanted the number of lines to be odd too…so: gatherings in 21 lines of 9 and 7 syllables.)

Eruption in the Virunga

for Rwanda

Nauseated with self-doubt

Mount Karisimbi eats her young—the

only thing she knows to do

to keep them all intact against a

grammar written in stigmata, now,

and not in language tepid as the

white asparagus that grows

deprived of sun, like veal, and

augurs no succession of

small sorrows like the shedding of small

limbs or inhalations snagging on

the shards of fear in every lung as

time just calves away, like ice,

molecularly changed but bearing

no one far from here or to the past

or future tense where this cannot be

happening, this alpenglow

at water’s edge, this wholly

indeciph’rable argot,

this monument to magma’s

insufficient appetite.