We begin with the question that begins us,
like a farce of rooms in the park,
the diffidence oblique, the cistern pattern
of pushed welcome, then irritation.
Preaccidental, the darkness is muffed
with some jolly time, skimpering down blocks
we have the clef to, before stuttering home.
A burrito will do, while waiting for the results,
pleasantly immersed in a cornery hole,
gazing at the blank manila envelope of the sun,
thumbing through a book on spared hogfish.
And in the glissando of hooked crowds, stool
pigeons and the same, amid buzzing limbs,
doesn’t something shimmer forth indirectly,
mute and pausing to the daily soundtrack,
like a ribbon of a monk’s costume (stowed)?
Call it Asteroid X, splittable and unpostulated.
Like a childhood bride bargaining down alleys,
her hair a mixture of stiff lettuce and lush snow.
Soon, sweat can do something odd, your brow
crenellated like a weak fortress, a puffed sog.
Light scissors the checkmate. Pong water drips.
And from one pinhole comes the anodyne,
and from another the merciless vantage point
of seeing the person you would love beg off,
and skitter away. The caseworm is as it must.
Concussional and overlarge, errands rehearse
the patio in the sky where you have to just kick
back and stare at tomes and treatises on gorilla
trysts, nefarious splendor, baking soda, cornpies.
There was so much we had to offer you, they
say, the actors, almost, as if aligned for sheerness.
Meanwhile, the macadam’s unappalled and crisp.
JULY 2009