This is the other world,
lopped in cinders
and ensuing. It’s uses
muslin and vacancy
and bled by none.
Foliage scatters over dusty enclosures.
Haw and ragweed brittles the jump.
And down the path, organ music
prunes the hedges of the old house.
I can see you coming, thistle.
Think of the roses heaped on porcelain.
And the offshore speech
from the radio by your cup.
Bored robin searches air.
Branch breaks. Ferns. Glens. Road.
Then a forking to the daisy barn.
It should be this way more often.
A consternation of bells.
The polluted, leathery look
of dander in your eyes and brocade
on your skin. I remember that mall.
It was like this one, in the dream.
It had velvet handles.
And two stimmied labels.
A pourage rolls on the card
in the dirt, by the picture of the flacid sea
on a picnic bench… Saint Jerome…
Wendy’s shoes.
A star weeps persimmons. That’s nice.
You wake up from bed and speed across space—
say, a laundromat or a dormant doormat.
Then the receiver wakes up, sputtering.
Nackered cheerios. Stewage of receipts.
I can’t get on to him yet.
It was like driving
on a wide open road, with soft, passive clouds
that had a sort of headache sheen, mottled in piques
of roseate splashes, brighted by emolsion.
We came through the dank air estranged and greeted
by some sense of ourselves later in the county evening.
Can’t that be enough? Just this time.
Can’t that be enough? Just this time.
It is. Dainty rodeo.
A leg-warmed sock of lamb.
An egg-baked brownie.
I think I left my life over there,
in the cubby, by the wood.
Felt photos, hats. Crumbs
that make a horizon of sorts.
No one left in here
by the miniature cruise liner
on the Small Towns of America book.
Your portrait has something familiar
about it. Reticent, like the liar sun.
Always a mantle of mane.
Waning bangs. Brown-yellow.
I’m hungry. It gets hot.
The pictionary lampshade is tilted.
And from that stance, the circumstance so to speak,
I can hear the weak witness of my weeks
buckle under the tremulous hours like minutes
lost in the convex brickwork of hands.
Stubbed stumble. Rubbed rubble.
Luckily it’s never time to leave here.
You can go out and bake a shot or two
of rubbing alcohol and smell the pneumonia
on the leaves and be olfactory comfortable.
Myself, I keep picturing a convertible.
That’s neither here nor hair. I guess
people have to grow wherever.
It takes something. Air mostly.
And sometimes that solvent,
pesky thing. Like what I miss.
The light, mostly. In our western parts
we get acquainted with sagging shadow
that seems to drawl over the mountains
like a man who is short, set apart,
unable to remember his past.
And that’s touching, if it lasts.
* * *
Symptoms, causes, cures. The prototypical vacuum cleaner.
And the elevator by the silent telephone.
And the bills we couldn’t unpile.
And the house that had two hosues in it—
one we imagined, one we knew we imagined.
Both, in the end, developed in the red room.
And set on the linen wall like a vibratory tune,
the moon got hungry so it opened the sky.
Rummaging around, short on tylenol, constipated
on superstitions of an elsewhere yesterday.
I try not to work too hard with my hands
but in these tiny parts, the thin lip of walking
is like a continent. It rushes over us in parts
and reminds us of the bushel of mothers
that had aroused dreams of lavender day.
I could use some of that now, the old spark.
But the dark perfunctory obligation
saddles up to one, apparition-like, a white horse
with pink snout, that stays in the living room,
unable to enter or exit. But it’s there. A wall.
You can go out now.
Visit the fruit jar.
Make private assignations about which friends left you
or which ones you left without noticing the process.
It’s been a purgatorial ordeal—much like it was for Florence.
The toothpaste sticks. The time-dial dilates. The faucet
is feral and not without its minute sense of pause.
If we only cherished this spruce lawn, with its dingy weed,
and cultivated it, and had a nice commercial imprint of it,
we could make something of ourselves, written on the edge
of the grass, in the Finnish menu that comes with home.
Let me tell you what you’ll have left to work with.
Maybe some maples that have a open rapport,
in this drifty town, where the cars know each other
in the Biblical style. The compartments of the easel
have come apart, slowly, like pairs of feet that imply
something, all musked up in the flowershop, while one
whispers with their eye, and the horns come flourishing
by in the pedestrian sense of flourishing. Use it. Carpets.
Soles. It all makes a version if you see to it, this afternoon.
MAY 2009