“Burnished,” when applied to limbs,
refers you to furniture, or wood
at least, a hint the skin has been burned
beyond the human, & then beyond.
Necessary for the removal of skin
from a burnished limb is an implement
sharper rather than duller, wieldy
& willing to dig without displacement.
The scrape of flint on a burnished limb
— if you say “arm” you must mean it —
resembles, no doubt, a chisel (of iron?)
that furls what’ s before it, away.
Begins in interruption:
an ambulance bell at the center
of sleep, the room tilts
sideways, furniture slides,
an octet of amber blue
verres à liqueur, one with a cut
at the lip, clatters as a quaalude
light in tatters mattes the
curtains ormolu:
I miss you
is what I want to say
like a rocket
stocked from the Reagan
years, its radar gone haywire,
wiring fried but
live inside a bunker of some
Grayscale breath on a fluid
field, with lo-fi
rainpatter — petrol blue — ,
a 60-watt sun uns
-crewed from the
woebegone sky: rip-
rap & coal slurries,
dragline & loess, what phosphor
-us is a semaphore
for, silklike
in its acoustic shadows
The giant takes us
down. A man with no arms.
Unbreakable.
What made today
is concordant,
transforms
the brief decisive phase we call fear.
I look to that whited-over part and see a face.
Then I look to the black and
see the same face.
There were tunnels… chambers
beneath some of the sidewalks… page after page of places…
The last thing you think of.
Won’ t be my fluffy blonde hair.
The last line should strike like a lover’ s complaint.
You should never see it coming.
And you should never hear the end of it.
Fate piles up
On the bloody Norman shore.
If you must swim there
Swim on your back.
— ALL HUGE LIKE GIANT FLIGHTLESS KIWIS TWICE THE
SIZE OF OSTRICHES,
they turned and walked away from us
and you were there Jane and you were twenty-two
but this was the nineteen-forties,
in Wichita, near the edge of town, in a field
surrounded by a copse of cottonwoods. It was
THERE ARE HILLS LIKE SHARKFINS
and clods of mud.
The mind drifts through
in the shape of a museum,
in the guise of a museum
dreaming dead friends:
Jim, Tom, Emmet, Bill.
— Like billboards their huge faces droop
and stretch on the walls,
on the walls of the cliffs out there,
where trees with white trunks
makes plumes on rock ridges.
My mind is fingers holding a pen.
