The Red Lady of Paviland

In Goat’s Hole, close to thigh
where pockets are: two piles
of periwinkles, the rusty whore.
Made four thousand years older

by science. Buckland spots it;
bits of beef & crocodile hide

lodged between the beak
of a toucan head he had been gnawing.

Fish in the template of the pit
of her stomach stains that witch

famous for being red, dead
& not quite a lady, made later

man by Buckers discovering
the odd groins of women.

& beat of belling all in the earth
left of his ears, fimetic wet

stuff at the brim of the sockets
blinking by action of beetles.

Rods and rings, burnt body and things,
bared to Cardiff to cruisers of death.

Him, gymnosophystic, lecturing
the lecturer with mind bloated

by biblical floods. The old, older
heart gone to ancient worms.

Buckland liked to think of kings
& having never eaten one gobbled

it quick, toasting mice. But woolly
rhinos were just about the limit

for a man like him. In Goat’s Hole,
the archetype of a Chris de Burgh song

gargarizes a gardyloo to Wales
in hypothetical languages, swilling

silt. Our Eve, the first ancestor
a hermaphrodite prostitute, eater

of reindeer, locks the painter
of death in her bones. & all

we know is red & mammoth
tusk, the painter as arranger,

a seashell necklace suggestive
of surfing. Tainting like ochre,

the Now and its stuff. I cannot
get there well enough.