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,
The one horse you gave me
you took back when she went insane,
when she began to chew wood
instead of the expensive grain
we bought from the feed store,
the grain that had the sweet smell
of molasses and was good for even
us to chew. She turned into
an ugly thing with her wild thoughts,
and I forgot about the beauty
expected of her when her blanket
filled out and complemented
her chestnut body and the name
the Nez Percé gave her. She rotted
and began to stink of promises
On abandon, uncalled for but called forth.
The hydrangea
Of her crushed each year a little more into the attar of herself.
Pallid. Injured, wildly capable.
A throat to come home to, tupelo.
Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable.
Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear.
Wistful, woke most every afternoon
Mouthful of earth, hair half a century silvering, who buried him.
With what. Make a fist for heart. That is the size of it.
Also directives from our DNA.
The nature of his wound was the clock-cicada winding down.
He wound down.
July, vapid, humid: sails of sailboats swelled, yellow boxes
Of cigars from Cuba plumped. Ring fingers fattened for a spell.
On rain washed paper dried, ink
still blurs. But all words
are stains. The paper’ s rippled
lunar, mountain and crater,
and seas on the moon, misnomer
of plains that looked like
water once, no-end-to-it shadows,
fractal to fractal. The telescope’ s eye
fooled the eye. From there, does
earth rise and set? Or a thrush,
would it sing its trouble backward? —
the most private tremor first, then
It’ s now all about money
about which poetry rarely reaches
transcendence. But love must still fester
even under that. Everyone I know
frets if poetry can still matter,
but what about love? It’ s all become
too much for them, and they’ re all
on the soma. It makes sense
with these pills when the someone
they thought they loved for years
by never thinking about it says,
“I don’ t love you anymore,
but let’ s stay friends in that mellow
woebegone way poetry now
sings without singing.” Of course,
Birdsong, face it, some male machine
gone addled — repeat, repeat — the damage
keeps doing, the world ending then starting,
the first word the last, etc. It's that
etcetera. How to love. Is a wire
just loose? Build an ear for that. Fewer, they say.
So many fewer, by far. He's showing off
to call her back. Or claiming the tree.
He was touched or he touched or
she did and was, or they were
and would. Or the room could, its
three doors, two windows or
the house on a slant touching,
touched by the drift down street, cars
pressing quick or slowing. All along
the town touched a river, the river
There’ s a mystery
By the river, in one of the cabins
Shuttered with planks, its lock
Twisted; a bunch of magazines flipped open,
A body. A blanket stuffed with leaves
Or lengths of rope, an empty gin bottle.
Put down your newspaper. Look out
Beyond the bluffs, a coal barge is passing,
Its deck nearly
Level with the water, where it comes back riding
The way a tired Chippewa woman
Who’ s lost a child gathers up black feathers,
Black quills & leaves
That she wraps & swaddles in a little bale, a shag
Cocoon she carries with her & speaks to always
As if it were the child,
Until she knows the soul has grown fat & clever,
That the child can find its own way at last;
Well, I go everywhere
