The loop was a refrain of terror, I know why: trapped birds, and hunters making lists, and other accusations. The Tennesseans were firing into the absorbent sky in the evenings, and their stately license to harvest in the air became a snowglobe of exploding feathers— and then supply lists, etc: their munitions filled the battery blinds, the white exits of their guns flashed a ragged row of abusing teeth in the canes.
I was barely there, in the refuge.
Born in Tennessee, they absalom out of sleep and are confirmed by vespers at midnight. In the bed of a Tennessean I heard their combat on the howling Cumberland.
There was my fruitless thing,
bleak thigh, I held her small imperious feet in my accounting hands, then the volume of the minute of our sex was mincing upwards, staged on a buttercup mattress, the backdrop bangs were unlikely futures, but the obligation was on my alien left, I still gave it some prospect, yes, yes. She asked if I’d open a window to place a dowel, to let the proof in.
The compromise was at the worked edge of the yard— I let the lawn, but
obliged everyone.
I was robbed from the winter, and the minibuds were not new. Instead the white stars on stalks
erupted
freshly from a grave in mind for my father’s body
Though, already poured him
into the small noisy river, and the bonebits blinked in the current
From this aspect the sunlight or its declension offered only clinical eyeing, to the bottom, with
the pumice
: There he goes, to the ocean of the ocean—
The cemetery flowers were actually plastic, or were the tenuous monument of a
“treatment,” and another, and another
The perfume reeked of its own research, which was a final fly in the sill— six spokes in a peaking
crown of
legs
I wouldn’t blow the whistle
or rev the end
— (no worry) I wouldn’t
welcome the trembling gap between the shuffling electric hymn and the unknowing ear
tuned to its tune but not theirs
it is about god, then, is it?
Death is in the edit and in the attic.
Sometimes walk the curving hillside road,
my body is child again in the summer.
This new weather
this work strain
this night dew
is it a change, as hoped, or the same?
I remember the tamarisk
a waft blown over the rise
or the vantage from dirt slopes.
I could pray to god or a butterfly
the same in this world,
the dazzling otherness of the world is my only.
The shells wended into the cambrian beaches
ancient but I may remember
the porch the open door, dawn circling heaven
heaven circling sunset.
I spit on the whetstone as the sky dims
I drink from the well,
I think of
the benign neighs of the horses who lay
in the barn and I am pleased
at the fire I stoke.
I am furnished with an old fiddle too,
it so fantastically improbable
that I play it,
I am the ardent amateur,
I play only the rumor of a song you’d know
with a fastness to get it all in before —you know.
Every man is following along his own stitch
in time with temerity, ascribing his shortcomings
to his beginnings.
For example,
I’ve moved every rock in the field, I guess
as if a reprisal against nature—
as if in the consistency of rows.