Our substitute is strange because
he looks a lot like Santa Claus.
In fact, the moment he walked in
we thought that he was Santa’ s twin.
We wouldn’ t think it quite so weird,
if it were just his snowy beard.
But also he has big black boots
and wears these fuzzy bright red suits.
He’ s got a rather rounded gut
that’ s like a bowl of you-know-what.
And when he laughs, it’ s deep and low
and sounds a lot like “Ho! Ho! Ho!”
Mortal oddment, there’ s no wish in the blood
But beat, but stay gift-strong, but make demands
To keep within veins this ore’ s diffuse gold,
These voices that know without being known —
These voices that riddle thought with herself,
Ridicule thought in her flimsy eternal
Gowns a child can tear in half with a breath —
That chorus arterial, unbribable,
Blowing song through self as a child blows
A dandelion apart —
All those weeds? —
To invent the alef-beit,
decipher the grammar of crows,
read a tangle of bare branches
with vowels of the last leaves
scrawling their jittery speech
on the sky’ s pale page.
Choose a beginning.
See what God yields and dirt cedes
when tines disturb fescue, vetch, and sage,
when your hand dips grain from a sack,
scattering it among engraved furrows.
The King asks, “Tell me, what is the highest meaning of the holiest truths?”
The Seer answers, “Emptiness, without holiness.”
The King is a restless seeker.
The Seer is a ruler and thief.
I am seriously watching how trees are always missing some leaves.
They sweep the air looking for them. Nothing distracts them. Nothing.
Where leaves are missing between the branches, beautiful sun porches,
which disappear when the tree reaches them.
“Who are you?” the King asks.
“It is not like that,” the Seer says.
We stopped at a farmer’ s house
before parking at the dock
that creaked over the river.
Rowboats for rent, five bucks
an hour, twenty for the day.
Deep water: I knew a canvas bag
was in the trunk. I knew lunch
would be roast beef sandwiches
and hot stew from a thermos,
chunks of carrot and potatoes
cut by my mother who slept
through the racket of our leaving.
There's nothing more
erotic than
onered
Chilean plum
slumbered in
the brown palm
of the curved
hand of the right
man.
When I read about the garden
designed to bloom only white flowers,
I think about the Spanish friar who saw one
of my grandmothers, two hundred years
removed, and fucked her. If you look
at the word colony far enough, you see it
traveling back to the Latin
of inhabit, till, and cultivate. Words
We keep trying to kill it, split it, hack
It to itsy bits. We suspend it
On the wall where we can see it
Passing. We hang it around our necks
Or wrists, laying pulse next to
Pulse as if each might like
Company. Ba-bump, etc. Rising
And setting has everything to do
With it. In the afternoon we feel so
Lazy we try not to close our eyes
And jerk awake, wondering what has
Passed, and where did we go
For that suspended hour,
And could anything keep us here.
I know my leaving in the breakfast table mess.
Bowl spills into bowl: milk and bran, bread crust
crumbled. You push me back into bed.
More “honey” and “baby.”
Breath you tell my ear circles inside me,
curls a damp wind and runs the circuit
of my limbs. I interrogate the air,
Before I was born, I saw a tissue of ingenious detours, an inextricable tangle
wreathed with mistake.
Perhaps the ghost does not limp away, but rather forests flee me, frightened.
Look, they are setting a place for loss, clearing the table for the first glow of
antiquity.
Here we see William T. Walters in his little library illuminated, carefully
smoothing the lip of the continent.
What form bounds forward from behind but The Atlantic Railroad Coastline Co.?
The whole Roman Empire was sold by ascending auction in 193 A. D.
