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There is a strange world

in the changing of a light bulb,

the waxing of a bookshelf

I think I could grow by,

as into a dusty dream

in which each day layers

against one just past

and molds the one to come,

content as cabbage

drudging towards harvest.

The congregation began to rustle in preparation for Sister Pearl. Sister Pearl had been the choir headmistress for forever and a day. She claimed many times that she lost her voice singing for the devil. Sometime in her twenties she decided she wanted to sing the dirty blues, like Aretha Franklin. She quit the church and started singing along the Chitlin Circuit in Chattanooga, Nashville, Louisville, and on up to Chicago. One day, she said, the Lord took her voice away, and that’s when she returned to church.

I've lurked in chat rooms with discussion threads devoted to such subjects as “A previously unknown Albert Goodell brace found in the wild.” One sweltering summer morning, on the Jay County fairgrounds in the farming village of Portland, Indiana, I walked among fabulous machines as small as schnauzers and as huge as elephants, all gleaming in the August sun. Drive belts whirred, flywheels revolved, pistons fired, and a forest of smokestacks piped foul smoke and rude music into the otherwise cloudless sky. Mostly, I have ridden a Midwestern circuit of flea markets and farm auctions in the passenger seat of an emerald green Toyota pickup truck piloted by a fifty-five-year-old botanist with a ponytail, spectacles like windowpanes, and a beard verging on the Whitmanesque.

There are no personal phone calls allowed. We do, however, allow for emergencies. If you must make an emergency phone call, ask your supervisor first. If you can’t find your supervisor, ask Phillip Spiers, who sits over there. He’ll check with Clarissa Nicks, who sits over there. If you make an emergency phone call without asking, you may be let go.

In that darkness,

Speakers rose like

Housing projects,

Moonlight diamonded

Mesh-wire panes.

What was it that bloomed

Around his curled

Body when the lights

Came up, fluorescent,

Vacant, garish?

The gym throbbed

With beats & rage

And his eyes darted

Like a man nailed

To a burning crucifix.

Egrets picketing the spines of cattle in fields edged

with common tansy. Flowers my father gathered

for my mother to chew. To induce abortion. A common,

cosmopolitan agnostoid lithofacies naked in the foothills. I love

the character of your intelligence, its cast as well as pitch.

Border wide without marginal spines. At high angles

to the inferred shoreline.