Fruitless
A grief of salt over a deer’s last leap, collapse of
that crystal palace over the fatal synaptic blink, risen
into a fifth day of indignity. Absolved,
she softens. The township’s embossed her
with acid. Unhinged, she is: pelt split, within visible, sting
dissolving acts: nosing apples, lying with sisters.
Fractals disguise the isolate body.
Why me? is a fruitless question, and dangerous.
Snowflakes touch her unseeing eye, the feminine tense,
It had been before it never was and never will be again.
Horizon
The hatchlings wrestle from gum and yolk, sealed
envelope or leather-bound diary,
picking the lock with an egg tooth, which falls after a day,
and the horizon is compass, is the will to live
encoded for millennia, so they courage on with jellied
siblings toward the saline. Let there be not
confusion of photography or artificial white wave tips
of a Publix. The mother, in the birth-trance,
shed salty tears, scattered sand
for decoy nests, then disappeared forever.
When Jennifer, with her mellifluous accent, asked
if I had any kids myself, I said (too loud and braless) I feel
as though I’m just becoming a person, which was
too woo for the occasion. The one who survives out of two
thousand glimmerings will use Earth’s magnets
to home to the same beach (regression) in maturity.
Red Lake
I feel as if I’m always on the verge of waking up.
—Fernando Pessoa
Was spring, naturally, verve of fugitive colors finding voice,
and seeing subjects as they were: portrait of Pope Innocent X
in its own red room, the clasped couple in masks
(his edema hands, her nerves), and my shame, magma of
the first life coming fast to surface, and curious if Velázquez
used Red Lake or Madder or Opera for the cape. Enflamed, thinking of
the Negroni to be had on a terrace. In Florida, a red tide
stank the sand. Almost moved there before the virus. What a disaster
(Write it!) that would have been. Or is the road not taken
ruby-studded? Now I’m in the West, a mile closer
to the sun, its protons, plasma, and had the deepest dream last night
in the mountains. I was a cave dweller in a high-up cave
with two wolfy children. My mate (I thought like that) was huge,
asleep by the embers. The cave mouth held the lightest blue of daybreak,
a white glow. It rained a frail rain. I was at peace
inside the frame of my dream-painting, then woke and searched
for all the versions of Bacon’s Study after …
Motionless travel. Like on that bench in Lisbon, the canary,
gold, mustard blur it was as I stuffed cherries in my mouth, tonguing
them as the red-naped woodpecker sucks its sapwell and guards it
and makes the sound of a child crying, inconsolably red.
Two Donkeys in Eternal Rain
Lopsided in the crag, in the sticky realm of pagan
beehives, their honorable heads precede bodies that seem sewn
of soaked felt, whitewash of teeth like the flat
tink, tink of highest piano keys in a barren house, in druidic elderflowers.
Their existence seems a rebuke of symmetry, which is
beauty boiled down. If you’re beautiful, you don’t wonder.
People tell you. And the frayed sun
shone and staggered in the up. In blue and red patchwork
blankets, they were a reincarnation of true wanderers under the North
Star. Whorl in the wood of the world. Little and Skellig Michael
risen in the opacity like the spines of monsters.
Cradle Language
Frill of cloud, a Her in the blue endless. Uneven hammering,
tantrum, panting, axe overhead in weightless indecision. Grimness
rushing from a well, numb feet and hands (gone),
milky mouth sour, a ropewalking spider
touching dolly’s raggedy head, skull plates fusing. First snow:
paint shook from sill with each blow. Tip-to-tail jolt of cuckoo.
Pokeweed
But first a mockingbird must strafe
the scene like an F-16, twirling seed into manure
shroud-gray and poured on an auspicious day
(Venus visible, sky whistle-clean)
shuffling overhead angelic favorites.
As the mourning dove sips its bitter bright, so too
the cardinal, whose pious silks resist the poison,
its shade recalling pickled beet picnics
of the 1960s. Civil War soldiers pressed its death
in handkerchiefs, used juice to ink letters
in a swoony script that’s left the landscape, hope
and sweetheart leant in loops and flourishes.
Into Appalachian poverty salad go immature leaves,
twice-rinsed. Further vanished, the Algonquian
who roamed and river’d here, deviling feathers,
shafts of arrows garneted for courage.
Suspended in piss or spit, fat or yolk, dye
binds to bridle or dress, flamboyant as an hour-long
kiss beneath the Perseids’ quicksilver tail flicks
or poke-painted horses galloping to war.
Marrow’s in Vogue
so the veal, watched over like a prodigy, gifts its last
possession. Stuff like February slush in hollows
must be coaxed by an oven to soften but not run away. We like it
better than butter, with parsley to cut the unctuousness.
We like to trim the byssus from the mussel, see trotters’ toes
almost human in the cold with other bundled offal,
for fish heads to show us xylophones
below in dismal buckets. We stroke shocked eyes,
palm kidneys slippery as trumpets abandoned
in field grass by a defeated army, reborn into ragtime.
Paired with deep red, spread hot on toast, is a taste of privacy,
a ledger of losses, Beyond and Before, trembling incarnate.
Lackluster, 2002
Isolatress of the Zinc Bar beside some bore
droning buckshot shenanigans,
Sartre, studded cheek
and rubble asmolder, gray matter jukeboxing
smoke into two tracks dubbed
Courgette and Orchid, fragment of the Hey
there grin of that girl on the sidewalk
on skates in New Orleans,
hologram of
every Esmé ever, corsage
affixed to the X,
antennae of xenon bulbs oracling
24/7 their apex luminescence, drinking in
the aftermath gratis mimosas,
reward for spilling a Tetris of yesses, spring’s
tongue, Go on, on the very equinox.
