We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
And when you open your mouth,
a ball of yellow light falls to the floor
and burns a hole through it.
Don’ t tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.
Did you ever, you start,
wear a certain kind of silk dress
and just by accident,
Up late watching slug porn, you confess
you had a boyfriend who could spin you
like that, slug grace and slug ballet — we don’ t
touch the topic of slime — and those eyes
dangling from tentacle tips must be a
kind of love or lust, sighting farther and
nearer all at once. (But are those eyes?)
Slug sublimity suggests love’ s a drag,
touch that lingers and leaves a wet trail of
memory and... What did we do before
YouTube? Boob tube. Boobs we have none; slugs,
of course, don’ t care, can’ t tell girl from boy,
"I thought of you as a butterfly tonight," getting to eschatology from a sketchpad, your mom's.
And though you write sermons nice and linear you also digress and about-face.
The jeroboam trees are dark tonight.
Darker in the outage than the stars let the sky be.
Partyers all.
The abbot told you, "I do not have power, the archbishop does not have power, the pope does not have power. Only God has power."
Then it is not a kind of violence to put a photo of the Pope in a luscious hacienda, imperilled by a minature pullbell.
A stick of carrot is equal to a gillyflower.
A gillyflower is equal to a drum of gasoline.
A drum of gasoline is equal to a stick of carrot.
“For the sake of my offspring, I think I’ ll marry an outsider.”
Tamerlane has been sighted in Northern Italy.
Jesus has broken out in Inner Mongolia.
They like to kiss outside and piss inside.
We like to kiss inside and piss outside.
A heave of afternoon light pulls a tulip from the turf, a bower for locusts, a cup of shells. The farmhouse tilts, a bent shadow on wheels. In cedar rooms a family is molded, silent, wrapped in the wire of steel eyes and stopped voice, romantic ash. This is not my house, my ghost, my uninvited guest, my lost labor of love, my thicket or grease, my JPEG gessoed or rawhide suit. The yellow light throbs like an internal organ — soft body of an overture to insect sounds — sapling of a new world — whose future awaits me at the tilting window of my own domestic hut.
I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning
to the sea,
then turned right along
the surf
rounded a naked headland
and returned
along the inlet shore:
it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high,
crisp in the running sand,
some breakthroughs of sun
but after a bit
continuous overcast:
A yarn ball and a hill
maintain an equipoise until
their neatness starts to bore the gods
of potential and energy
who hedge bets, reckoning the odds
of when the rest will be
These lovers’ inklings which our loves enmesh,
Lost to the cunning and dimensional eye,
Though tenemented in the selves we see,
Not more perforce than azure to the sky,
Were necromancy-juggled to the flesh,
And startled from no daylight you or me.
What’ ll it be?
Roast beef on rye, with tomato and mayo.
Whaddaya want on it?
A swipe of mayo.
Pepper but no salt.
You got it. Roast beef on rye.
You want lettuce on that?
No. Just tomato and mayo.
Tomato and mayo. You got it.
… Salt and pepper?
No salt, just a little pepper.
You got it. No salt.
You want tomato.
Yes. Tomato. No lettuce.
No lettuce. You got it.
… No salt, right?
Right. No salt.
You got it. Pickle?
No, no pickle. Just tomato and mayo.
And pepper.
In simmer when the hay was mawn,
And corn wav'd green in ilka field,
While claver blooms white o'er the lea,
And roses blaw in ilka beild;
Blythe Bessie, in the milkin-shiel,
Says, I'll be wed, come o't what will;
Outspak a dame in wrinkled eild,
O' gude advisement comes nae ill.
