Work boots in the basement thrown against a wall. The garden dies in the mind— nasturtiums entwined on a chain-link fence. The gods he carried nothing but dried crusts. That vintage bottle on the table crushed more each time he hammers it.
So autumn comes to an end with these few wet sad stains Stuck to the landscape, December dark Running its hands through the lank hair of late afternoon, Little tongues of the rain holding forth under the eaves, Such wash, such watery words . . . So autumn comes to this end,…
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” —Janis Joplin But when you lose it’s only you and the hard wood maple floor beneath you, your shoulders pinned down, wet shirt on a clothesline by the knees of a god leather-clad in medieval thigh-highs. He forces you to repeat or he’ll show you…
Bird shit streaking down the backs of Adirondack chairs, a naked woman sketching. Is the point of art to know what hands will do? For a moment she looks up, then resumes.
Nothing is flat-lit and tabula rasaed in Charlottesville, Umbrian sackcloth, stigmata and Stabat mater, A sleep and a death away, Night, and a sleep and a death away— Light’s frost-fired and Byzantine here, aureate, beehived, Falling in Heraclitean streams Through my neighbor’s maple trees. There’s nothing medieval and two-dimensional in our town, October…
In order for a rapprochement with the physical body Only necromancy could be behind it. Racked on a stretcher the I.V. tubes string me up like a cello without a player Only necromancy could be behind it. These days of horse-drawn betrayal. Like a cello without a player I’m caught, a crown of thorns,…
But later, to teach myself humility I worked exclusively with breath, with the insubstantial, with what does not last, not leave a record behind those streamers, those ribbons we trail from our bodies banners, flags of the living excrement of the mouth and lungs, though we do not like to think that the spirit is…
October in mission creep, autumnal reprise and stand down. The more reality takes shape, the more it loses intensity— Synaptic uncertainty, Electrical surge and quick lick of the minus sign, Tightening of the force field Wherein our forms are shaped and shapes formed, wherein we pare ourselves to our attitudes . . ….
The speaker is the young black man Susan Smith claimed kidnapped her children. Though it’s common belief That Susan Smith willed me alive At the moment Her babies sank into the lake When called, I come. My job is to get things done. I am piecemeal. I make my living by taking…
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