Poetry Magazine
Refuge Field
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.
Source: Poetry (December 2006).
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This poem originally appeared in the December 2006 issue of Poetry magazine
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Biography
Poet Dana Levin grew up in California’s Mojave Desert and earned a BA from Pitzer College and an MA from New York University. Levin’s collections of poetry include In the Surgical Theatre (1999), Wedding Day (2005), and Sky Burial (2011). Selecting Levin’s manuscript for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, Louise Glück praised the work as “sensuous, compassionate, violent, extravagant.” In the Surgical . . .
POET’S REGION U.S., Southwestern
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