…what of the glowing spine,

what of the toy stings of stock footage flames,

what of the jets you swatted dead

from the air with unmistakable joy,

you of the plastic-leather, pebbled Pleistocene flesh,

you of the palsied fury, you

of the put-upon by dissemblers and disturbers,

you, what of the life burned

so cheaply into celluloid we are charmed…

Imagine if each time we kissed

my ear fell off. If the morning

was not so much for brushing

the fog of the night from the mouth,

but reassembly. You might go

out into the day with my bad ankle.

I’d never hear the end.

Let’s eat something no sane person would eat

and in the dark with our zealous fingers

like savages. Each rich subterranean rind

or wheel of cheese we’ll pretend

to fluently call forth from greater darkness

than this. Avatars of avarice, open

mouth to sautéed cephalopods

and crusted crustaceans and bivalves over braziers,

let’s swell until the dawn

like storm clouds, like stomachs, like stolid

hunger.

Coyotes invade. They claim to be the truth.

Black bears nose the bougainvillea, moving

eastward, indiscriminate, original.

Our sinks back up, our toilets will not drain,

our nature disobediently tends toward nature.

I hate you truly. Truly I do.

Everything about me hates everything about you.

The flick of my wrist hates you.

The way I hold my pencil hates you.

The sound made by my tiniest bones were they trapped

     in the jaws of a moray eel hates you.

Each corpuscle singing in its capillary hates you.

Look out! Fore! I hate you.

That the water was transformed, yes, a miracle, but

that the resultant wine was good – ah, conviction,

sensing the presence of divinity in the guest

who exclaims to the host but you’ve saved the best

for last! – to smell a god in the mother asking her son

please, do something or the party will be ruined, ruined!

And the body is beautifully there, like hoarfrost.

Tears on its face now glimmering like dimes

falling from a slot machine, or a stream, thought lost,

that breaks through fresh snow at wintertime.

From Brother Salvage, posted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press

Throughout, the children see things strange

or stranger than their dads: muskmelons

from Ottawa shaped like a sheriff’s mistress

coupling with a squid.

                                    Sights to make Jesus

weep – the pickled two-headed fetus, a hell

of mirrors, with other horrors under glass.

From Brother Salvage, posted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press

The irretrievable hours have sifted.

A courtroom near Vienna. A gavel

slams. Order. Uncharged and held

without bail, here I learn my crime:

Impropriety. That young vagrant

haunts me still. She came into my room

one night, disrobed, insisting she work

for rent; and though underage, unlovely,

I obliged.

From Brother Salvage, posted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press

IV. On Graduate School

Grass for acres and trees tall,

Then, everywhere there should be

Some harvest to guard, sprouts

A building in which I am mistaken

For a broom, handled as such,

And given to the floor. To dust.

I am here to learn: that which fears me

Must be crow

In this hall of heavy doors

Where my body is a blemish.

They were of a different hue.

They were all the same color.

The roaches at 51 Felton Street

Went to work when we snored.

They raced for black lines

At the flick of a switch.

They were an athletic sort.

My father’s embrace is tighter

Now that he knows

He is not the only man in my life.

He whispers, Remember when, and, I love you,

As he holds my hand hungry

For a discussion of Bible scriptures

Over breakfast. He pours cups of coffee

I can’t stop

Spilling.

The last visitor left.

You closed the door and smiled at me.

I watched you cross Room 515 through

the flowers in vases, and your face

looked just like your face, smiling

down at me in my stupid green issue gown.

I felt myself want you

through the plastic tubes, 

the vines around, across and above me.

I felt myself want you

exclusively. Even pain faded

into the scenery as you leaned in

to kiss me. And I met your kiss

with my lips and we were both

folded into it,

into that clean clean folding,

that soft longed-for kiss

across the side rails. That particular kiss

in its delicious oblivion hoisted us

above the suffering body.

We felt that long transfer of soft

for softness, that kiss lifting us

above the basement drawers

where we would finally face up.

The seven astronomers lay on their backs,

upside-down skydivers.

The universe, said Galileo,

is made of interlocking shapes

written in a language of mathematics.

But how did it begin?  someone asked.

Your father's erection greeted your mother

through the window

of his underpants.

And then what happened?

A release of hormones; secretion

from neurons in the brain:

"I love you."

"I think I love you."

In the stirring of the wind, the glittering green

my story began. I’ve been laurel,

olive, fig and fir; I return again to play the role

of hospitable tree. I’m twenty years elderly,

yes, geriatric for a Pumpwood, a Cecropia –

these names they call me, they who listen

who know such bedecked and decorated

choirs in the cathedral of one rainforest tree.

I’ve fallen in finales. It’s a specialty,

but I fear the final scene: wind not a murmur but a crack.

Whitman kept all the sleepers to himself but one, & she wasn’t just a demon

in the sack. When she wasn’t sleeping by daylight, she was the demon

slinging a house shoe at her children over the front seat of the Plymouth

while simultaneously steering it between the orgasmic, careening semis &

Beetle Bug Blue, Piddiddle, Beetle Bug Black.

The very best woman in all the world

auditions for Juliet’s part.

But blinded by spotlights

on the silver gilt balcony, she leans too

far out over the set &,

hand over heart, plunges

into the orchestra pit. That is the way

of answering love letters

voiced up from the dark –

The husband is a figment of the imagination: Continually wearing a rented

            tux & clipping new boutonnières from the neighbor’s garden. He

is as the mayfly who exists for 24 hours then dies

to be replaced with his identical self. He is everything that arrives on time

            & in his suitcase he stores enough glass slippers to fit anysized foot.

You will know him by his locks: Bronze.