Sunday Poem

INCLUSION 

First was the claw and the claw
clasping clay, closing in breath. 

More turns to them than to sea-snails,
brain and gut ravelled like yarn 

into clews to be threaded through.
Like Theseus, I was closed-in 

with an abomination of bestial desire:
she wanted to be nailed by a bull 

and she did a bull and bore
a bull-of-a-thing with a menacing club. 

It's with this thought that I'm locked,
throughout this maze that I travel. 

I've no key, no clue: only minatory echoes
and shadows to see it through.

By Asa Boxer, from Etymologies (with essay by David-Antoine Williams, 
Anstruther Press, 2016)