ATHEISM

—after Peter Brueghel Why a tree except the world sustains? The harvesters’ clean whites so far from town. Like fountains, water drops of grass heads. Like postscript, endless roads through Flanders. Close up, men like lapel buttons through haloes, mending, mending. Like snakeskins, white shirts against gold. The maze leads, panoramic, to the earth’s shelf

Weather flew across the field. Over the horizon the land tacked to a cloud. The field continued into night a far town lit.

A strange, soft creature rests tethered in my mouth, gentle aesthete, wet and bumpy, discerning shades of salt, sweet, bitter, sour beyond any practical necessity, understandably alarmed by the occasional taco de lengua, more so by the sharp incisors sharing its space, but still making its modest contribution to speech, not sibilants or fricatives, of