5 November 2008 | Vol. 8, No. 3

Volcano

by NORMAN DUBIE

The filling station like a blue can

of sardines edged with rose granite,

rope and wooden ore buckets

at the high-water nest of burning grass

in the baking mud of the palo verde.

A giant sloth limp in tractor gears, the vast

related machines of a priest's calculations,

the far river of bodies

with the drowned nun,

her back arched over a tree limb, caked

to white mud—a heavy moth between her legs

lifts across the pitching sulfur

of the approaching night.

Green fruit on a card table.

At the roadside, a small boy

gnawing on corn smiles

with efficient hunger—no one else

is alive for a hundred square miles—

the road ruptured above and below him—

the jaguar smiles back

in a white cap of ash

that is also the night:

he watches

the boy eat, he fears him

and retreats with the mice into the hot banded night.