Francis Bacon’s Two Figures in the Grass (1954)

by James Pate

Out from where we huddle with slit skin
for our saint portraits. Our gilt
and molten chorus.

Temporal bones of our faces dripping
in gold-dark dawn.

Stray automobiles feather away
in wind.

A cliff in fog to take pictures at and stumble from. (Crimson
fog. Stereoscopic pictures.)

We label some voices Ourselves. Our speech-shadows. Our watchful
familiar strangers. Rooms beyond the mirror’s edge. Galvanized
remainders. Thought-and-nerve fluorescence.

This burgeoning flesh regalia, our flickering
obscurer legions.

In the soil the ones turning from secret to secretion.

Tonguewide fungi. Deep well faltering. July
prologues with their celestial tatters. Up
to the mica shine of the eyes, turn of the sprout-twisting grin.

Ivied thighward charnel-fields.

Among hotpink caladiums
our perishable shoulders and rainbright
face-smeared faces.

James Pate has had work published in Black Warrior Review, Heavy Feather Review, Ligeia, Coffin Bell, Oculus Sinister: An Anthology of Ocular Horror and Occulum, among other places. His books include the poetry collections The Fassbinder Diaries (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and Mineral Planet (Schism Neuronics), and the essay collection Flowers Among the Carrion (Action Books Salvo Series).