The Spiritual

In Hell the Units Are the Gallon and the Fuck

The unit of wine is the cup. Of Love, the unit is the kiss. That’ s here.
In Hell, the units are the gallon and the fuck. In Paradise, the drop and the glance.

Ants are my hero. They debate and obey. They can sit at a table for
Eight hours, drawing. They spot out the under-theorized...

Have some. For they are as abundant here as the flecks of mica in the Iowa night sky.
What are twenty-sided dishes of fancy almonds? What use jewels?

What Is Good

Out of the water call
my luminous breath,
into the bird, intending serpent, red,
who shakes himself, white,
out of that forest body, black.

Red gourd head spirit of the bush,
your breath is speech;
your speech is ordinary, pure.
I take you from the blue
glass of my sacred windows,
I ring you cold upon my father’ s weights.

On Cowee Ridge

John Gordon Boyd
died on the birthday
of three remarkable, and remarkably different, writers:
Heinrich Heine, Kenneth Patchen, Ross McDonald

John, too, was just as remarkable, blessed with an inherent “graciousness”
and with extraordinary eyes & ears…

I think of two texts
on the grievous occasion of his death:

“Religion does not help me.
The faith that others give to what is unseen,
I give to what I can touch, and look at.
My Gods dwell in temples
made with hands.”
— Oscar Wilde, in De Profundis

At the End of Life, a Secret

Everything measured. A man twists
a tuft of your hair out for no reason
other than you are naked before him
and he is bored with nakedness. Moments
before he was weighing your gallbladder,
and then he was staring at the empty space
where your lungs were. Even dead, we still
say you are an organ donor, as if something
other than taxes outlasts death. Your feet
are regular feet. Two of them, and there is no
mark to suggest you were an expert mathematician,
nothing that suggests that a woman loved

from Deaf Republic: 14

Each man has a quiet that revolves
around him as he beats his head against the earth. But I am laughing

hard and furious. I pour a glass of pepper vodka
and toast the gray wall. I say we were

never silent. We read each other’ s lips and said
one word four times. And laughed four times

in loving repetition. We read each other’ s lips to uncover
the poverty of laughter. Touch the asphalt with fingers to hear the cool earth of Vasenka

Deposit ears into the raindrops on a fisherman’ s tobacco hair.
And whoever listens to me: being

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