Shambling fleshy siege equipment,
Resting in the tabernacle,
the curtain sewn back up,
unseen drinks being swilled
in dubious relics,
a stemmed cup for each:
Let no thought of warring
or strife affect you, you
who crowd me daily,
and linger here on a night
where we walk umbrellaed
and over-shadowed through
these tunnels of streetlights
before your turned profile alights
and (with a gorgeously awkward
yank) enters into a restaurant.
You tip-toe around scattered rolls
and baked meats, a singer unharmed
by this now nightly routine.
You sing the passer-bys, you
sing me and fix my head
so as to make cartoonish
my yet unbroken stride.
Like you, all the figures stray
and pause, looking with sure features
at me and the pasts they know
I conjure and slip like an offering
into notebooks and pillows.
The reeds are tangled suns
yellow and stiff, smoldering
set stones in the shore's band
that wraps so tightly the wind's tresses,
which ripple and barrel sometimes
into those grassy orbs
that spread and allow whistling passage,
swaying for a moment into a ready archway
above a figure on the thin bank.
Below street-level, his back
to a bench turned away
as he drinks from the bowl of gusts
and breaths deep, his legs
grown in firm and rooted
between two flaming bushes.
Seated on roots and chips of wood
turned over and handled previously;
a pause
for rapture, for the blanket
of steely undulations of fog
filling softly the space between
fanned branches and eyelashes,
piling up and dusting
written upon white walls
not fully erased, markings smudging
and unbudging in busy confusion
and disparate fragments
that work on my fingers
drizzling timber and dirt.
A puddle splayed across the path
a school of cigarettes
cowering in a flooded sidestep
printed in the mud spackled
over grass and snow, congealing
at this point the valley clutches
trunks that taper up
into delicate-fanned tree shapes
static and arterial
in the grey-blue bosom of a sky
close and teary-bright.
Main street lined with beaming
dandelions of metal + glass.
Lights green-rusted and blistering
we pop them one at a time
into our mouths
roughly as we pass them.
You reach out and pluck
a brittle crystal bulb
from which the light oozes
over our fingers and eyes,
glowing and sated.
Road up turns, shrugs
and off its shoulder rises
this path of improvised steps
left-roots and rock slab-right
towards some clearing
rounded by trees
like cupped hands
cradling a removed city view.
We lie on a concrete square
here, incongruously planned
and left, as it strains no more
hoisting steel and water;
one foot of a local colossus
still guarding, still supporting
two backs
the horizon's insomnia
of stars and gaps
in the leaves.
A drunken shade, autumn traipses
down the paper'd hallway
ripping red sheets as he goes
the color floundering from the walls
a resonance beyond
that offered by stiff nostalgia
of familiar picket fences.
He stumbles on;
the floor turns golden
and sets.
Event with ponderous steps:
the field, unspoiled and rigid
under snow just beginning
to slink warmly into the ground.
The mud then grasps at passing soles
dipped and blessed
in burnt-brown water
trails. Wary and remembering
the soft pleated grass
this sun used to cue.
At the threshold here
of grey waste of rocky maws
joined, open to our stirrings
on the land made arable
to the touch, profuse
in golden bulls of dawn
their stark high horns
their formed flank billowing
each leg a pillar of smoke.
And their flesh cries out
its wails our offering
that silence denied
wrapped and not charring
but melting
as do the sounds in heat
dangling over this taut room;
I, your supplicant.
Stutter over familiar formations,
cast like New Orleans balconies,
stifled by heat and dust and the hammers
I wield as I gut it; the space is molded-
over, the drywall brittle. There is a sense
of digging, of excavation, though
so much will be thrown out. Books
and trophies, unidentifiable wads
of paper free (in an odd,
unsettling fashion) from attachment,
from feeling and comfort.
Whisper of a blue scarf, leading smoothly
a slight jacket of red, Irish-brown
hair alight the figure minding her step,
not minding me; laden and zipped up
unnaturally, the fastener taut under my chin,
minding myself and the stop-string
and my hair draped over it.
Automatic and hand-me-down laments
mingle with thoughts about poetry
and smoke and readings, work and the bus
concise and absorbing.
