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Man of War

After there were no women, men, and children,

from the somber deeps horseshoe crabs crawled up on somber shores:

Man-of-Wars' blue sails drifted downwind

and blue filaments of some biblical cloak

floated below: the stinging filaments.

The cored of bone and rock-headed came near:

clouds made wandering shadows:

sea and grasses mingled::

There was no hell after all

but a lull before it began over::

flesh lying alone: then mating: a little spray of soul:

and the grace of waves, of stars, and remotest isles.

Flight

Osseous, aqueous, cardiac, hepatic —
back from bone the echoes stroke, back
from the halved heart, the lungs
three years of weightlessness have cinched to gills.
From a leather chaise, the astronaut's withered legs
dangle, as back they come, sounds
a beaked percussion hammer startles into shape.
The physician cocks his head and taps — exactly
as a splitter halves his slate, the metamorphic rock
chisel-shocked, then shocked again, halved

Carolina

Nonentity’ s birthplace: a front yard sweeps
its dirt clean. Devil hopped up the oak tree,
devil-take-the-profit seized
a jay in the twigs by the feet, wings buffeting

this child’ s cheeks to rhyme. Leaf of gift
box tissue folded over her pocket comb. Hind
pocket kazoo. Won’ t somebody please start
something other & oddball soon,

narrow her down out of folly
& trivia to destiny? But Whynot the tortie cat
flopped an irregular sunny patch,
wriggles & rolls & revives the blissy fits of ignorance.

Reading Saint John of the Cross

How many miles to the border
where all the sky there is
exists for the soul alone?

Where the only breathers
breathing are constructed
from some new electricity
and the flowers are made
indestructible, and messages
from the dead arrive like calm
white birds with a gift?

One more night of spiritual
ice and we might all become
birds, green birds frozen
on a black winter branch.

There is a drumming in the shadows
under leaves: a million eight-eyed
spiders on the march.

The Hypno-Domme Speaks, and Speaks and Speaks

I was born as a woman, I talk you to death,
or else your ear off,
or else you to sleep. What do I have, all the time
in the world, and a voice that swings brass back
and forth, you can hear it, and a focal point where
my face should be. What do I have, I have absolute
power, and what I want is your money, your drool,
and your mind, and the sense of myself as a snake,
and a garter in the grass. Every bone in the snake
is the hipbone, every part of the snake is the hips.

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