Actaeon

Flowering hawthorn bursts the solar plexus,
and is wintered by the light's decline
into a seething mass of sticks,
a brittle-veined unknown.

A glimpse beyond that tangled wood and bone
into the seductive truth of artifice,
the body's wildly ramifying sign
now becomes nexus

of self-consumption, like a stag with its antlers
absorbing the whole forest, structure
gnawed to dysfunction,

hounds slavering at the rupture,
the inside out, the expanding reign
of the spaces where flesh refrains and falters.