Refuge Field

by Dana Levin

Dana Levin

You have installed a voice that can soothe you: agents
of the eaten flesh, every body

a cocoon of change—

Puparium. The garden
a birthing house, sarcophagidae—

And green was so dark in the night-garden, in the garden’s
gourd of air—

green’s epitome
of green’s peace, the beautiful inhuman

leg-music, crickets’
thrum—
a pulse

to build their houses by,
each
successive molt

a tent of skin
in which skin can grow, the metallic sheen
of their blue backs

as they hatch out, winged and mouthed—

Like in a charnel ground, you sit and see.

In one of the Eight Great
Cemeteries, you sit and see—

How the skull-grounds
are ringed by flame, how they spread out under

a diamond tent, how the adepts
pupate
among bones—

saying I who fear dying, I who fear
being dead—

Refuge field.

See it now.

That assembly of sages you would have yourself
build,
to hear the lineage
from mouth to ear, encounter the truth-

chain—

Saying, Soft eaters, someone’s children, who gives them
refuge from want—

Cynomyopsis Cadavarena. On every tongue
they feed.





Last updated November 17, 2022