THE DREAM IN
WHICH
your recesses, I will be equal
to your pangs. I will take
my will out of going away,
of tidying, of remedying
the dollhouse eyes and masquerade
hands of confidence. Outside
this little distance and looking
up: the ankles rupture. The shoes
surge. The laces slither
like scissors, or weeds
poisoned pungent, dry.
Horses’ hooves fall and
parachutes of dust coat
me in their hoary panoply.
I AM YOUR
BUTLER
THE DREAM
IN WHICH
MY ACCENT
IS NEARLY
AS PRONOUNCED
AS YOURS
like rain, the lavish coercions of a faucet?
It was orange food in an orange bowl,
orange as the thumbnails of flowers rhyming
so in a vase that once was a lamp. The next
time I will find again your first act. The weather
will light up, and with the thousand colors of
some project. Am I OK that my ambitions bow
to a different cardinal? I swear I cannot set
your table out of these three nails, but you
know I can rattle the knots right out
of the sun. Let’s never hear of the library,
the study, the pantries, those shards of lead
so urgently curating our moans.
THE
DREAM
IN WHICH
EVERY-
THING
WE SAY
RHYMES
Rooms rubbled with how
well you remain, where you
said before “I will be,” these
are the rooms that hide from me
behind open thievery. It’s a limp
crucifixion, stature, the effort
of skulls hectic with an indigent
light. The nickel and dime
grinders you recruited,
they could chew medicine into
the more giving arcs if you
could just give back to
them the fate of their limbs.
All your dangling can do
is gallery these rooms overcast
with ethereal steamers and valises,
cases that are their own wagons,
their own infernos caravanning
down the stupid sovereignties
I’ve joined amid the cobbles.
THE DREAM
IN WHICH
YOU
DISCOVER EL
DORADO
AFTER EL
DORADO
Look how the Halloween along these shores
frees me a metamorphosis. I am a scintillation,
aren’t I? A raspberry foam. An Arkansas
of checkered serenity. A pantheon whose
many postures shadow half-cypressed, spiting
the heavy tides. You see me. I find sickles
everywhere I seesaw too tall: in bays and
suburban turnarounds, cantaloupe networks,
misfired staples. Do you see me? Or, in
looking for me, do you view me ghostly? Am
I the pinhole admitting whichever of your
halos occludes me? See how those beaten
breakings eclipse the gimp who would
replace me in the obscurities of a last spy.
This swamp that would suckle Grendels
brings only puppets to its breast. I don’t
think I’ll holiday here any longer. Maybe
its time to see how your heart was ever
too much flexed in it own mass
to bluff the difference between
the harvested and the catered.
DREAM
IN WHICH
EVERY-
THING
WE SAY
RHYMES
well you remain, where you
said before “I will be,” these
are the rooms that hide from me
behind open thievery. It’s a limp
crucifixion, stature, the effort
of skulls hectic with an indigent
light. The nickel and dime
grinders you recruited,
they could chew medicine into
the more giving arcs if you
could just give back to
them the fate of their limbs.
All your dangling can do
is gallery these rooms overcast
with ethereal steamers and valises,
cases that are their own wagons,
their own infernos caravanning
down the stupid sovereignties
I’ve joined amid the cobbles.
THE DREAM
IN WHICH
YOU
DISCOVER EL
DORADO
AFTER EL
DORADO
Look how the Halloween along these shores
frees me a metamorphosis. I am a scintillation,
aren’t I? A raspberry foam. An Arkansas
of checkered serenity. A pantheon whose
many postures shadow half-cypressed, spiting
the heavy tides. You see me. I find sickles
everywhere I seesaw too tall: in bays and
suburban turnarounds, cantaloupe networks,
misfired staples. Do you see me? Or, in
looking for me, do you view me ghostly? Am
I the pinhole admitting whichever of your
halos occludes me? See how those beaten
breakings eclipse the gimp who would
replace me in the obscurities of a last spy.
This swamp that would suckle Grendels
brings only puppets to its breast. I don’t
think I’ll holiday here any longer. Maybe
its time to see how your heart was ever
too much flexed in it own mass
to bluff the difference between
the harvested and the catered.
of a dare. I will make a stupid leap, I will
dive into dying’s creviced pucker, down to alien
depths. A fundamental dribble sops my hearing so
entirely, the way the sun in a snapshot ages
well before its edges tarnish, the way I sup-
pose every photograph set in an album
reenacts itself in California. I stand, tilting
with whiskey and anniversaries, on the lip of
nostalgia’s low shelf, here where the references
direct their silent acrostics under lights bright
and blonde. From my vantage at the base of this
cascade, boats are unparalleled wings. A dittoed
number will wisely submerge itself in the melody
that is yet to be told, and that is how these names
you wrote bottom. That they sparkle, they sparkle
most with rust. Cactus and tumbleweed, stage-
coach and showdown: that hocus-pocus isn’t root-
less; it’s a moral. Drowning evaporates for you.