where the car hit him, fireweed sprang with
blazons of fennel
and umbels
of dill fell
through the spokes of a wheel
on Whistun holiday to the sun, Denton
Welch spun a web in his crushed cycle,
sat in the seat, spine curled up like a spider —
and spied: “saw
the very drops of sweat glittering frostily
between the shoulder blades”
of a lad
When the man behind the counter said, “You pay
by the orifice,” what could we do but purchase them all?
Ah, Sandy, you were clearly the deluxe doll, modish and pert
in your plastic nurse whites, official hostess to our halcyon days,
where you bobbed in the doorway of our dishabille apartment,
a block downwind from the stockyards. Holding court on
the corroded balcony, K. and I passed hash brownies, collecting
change for the building’ s monthly pool to predict which balcony
It appears that we’ re living (which isn’ t always the case), depending
on how one defines such things, in a “now you see it /
now you see it” kind of way. We can say we’ re working on our age,
as well, listening to Bob Dylan songs where people can age
in whatever direction supports the theme. “Too bad life doesn’ t
get themes,” Robin says, and yes, that’ s right, and then we can all go
do whatever it was we were going to do anyway. “It’ s either that,
or pay off the kidnapper,” as Neil Young had it, back in the mid-70s.
In my heart the old love
Struggled with the new,
It was ghostly waking
All night through.
Dear things, kind things
That my old love said,
Ranged themselves reproachfully
Round my bed.
In a culvert by the airport
under crumbling slag
wine colored water seeps
to this pool the two does
drink from: each sipping as
the other keeps look out.
The skyline is a blur
of barcode and microchip.
Even at home we hold
the narrowest purchase.
No arcs of tracer fire.
No caravans of fleeing
families. Only this
suspicion ripples
through our circles of lamp glow
(as you sweep the faint sweat
from your forehead and flip
another page in your novel)
Things are not
unmoving (or else what
is ing there for?)
The things once-living
fall on the never-living
all the more movingly for the eye
that passes over them.
The wind wells up
to spill a trail
of onces off the nevers,
take opaque from eye
to mind, or near it —
every rocking takes some leaving
to a stonish spirit.
And fleetingly it seemed to him
That in between one eye blink and the next
Time paused, allowing time to be installed
Within that countless interim,
Coiled up, on hold,
A memory predicted and recalled.
Now, that weak muscle flexed,
All that contained him started to unfold
This isn’ t maths —
perhaps it is
a collapse
of certainties.
Perhaps it can’ t
configure planes,
yet it can cloud
our blue remains
so when we fall
as rain will do,
nothing fails
to carry through.
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
The sill plays a cruel joke — thrones me. Frames me
lording over lawn mower stripes — myself
in a shallow trench. In grass blades. Myself
persisting, despite a dickhead sun — me
in chlorophyll. Early, I find myself
swaying — me! in the black chokeberry, me!
in the rabbit’ s throat. Me, the rabbit. Me
dancing out pellets. Out-dancing myself —
my father’ s pellet gun, the hawk. The joke
is a bright belly full of dark hopping
along my father’ s garden & the joke
small, between wrapped talons, is the hawking
