The Small Hour

the furnace clicks to flame

the wax amaryllis peeks through the blinds
from a thick stalk hinting at yellow

headlights shuffle downcast along

the first scrap of Sappho
“rescued from the City of Crocodiles”

The chairs have square holes mid-spine

empty as a sleeping television

“they caught friendship in a dragnet”
says the first bad read of fragment 1

the silver cup recalls a bell
but makes no sound

the carbon monoxide detector shines
between the curtain and the records

one more bottle will break the bar

stillness like a disease I’m drinking

with bad kid art taped to the walls
deformed blue jay

marker on diamonds of cardboard
soaked from toilet paper rolls

no bear no boar not even a beaver
as the streetlight paints the snow

bittersweet

this quiet on the ground floor
while the warmth crawls up the stairs

this alone with history

The Thin Blanket of Atmosphere

May a fist of clover and white cotton
rise from the mouths of the dead —

until they loose their memories.
The winds are blurry. The water thin.

Up close each face is a garden
seeded from another planet.

May the generative thrust find
its holster on the wall of the sea.

May the concept of bird
rub roughly across the day’s eye.

Brutal melons, sensual hoodie.
I’m holding a motorcycle

in each hand like a judge,
but I’m no judge. I’m reeling

in low-Earth orbit with all the trash
we’re raising like a sloppy wall.

May the distance between stars
stop hoarding time and light.

Who doesn’t deserve to feel small
in the pocket of a cloud? Just

in the evenings, when numbers
forget their cudgels and kiss.

Poor Kegler

You bolted the book shut. The
book of good names & the book
of off-cuts. You rendered from a pelt

the spoon & cup. We all want
around the gallery like a garden,
lurk behind the light you turn

when you’ve turned your face
to another. We touch your hangdog
postcards, say they are a kind

of cold that forgets what’s dead,
what’s a bust in lime, what’s a wing,
what’s a brick. The cold bustles

long among us churls who want
your altars to assemble a grin
we can track like root paths

under the sidewalk. Instead,
you spun the shapes of the States
into a map of Europe. Planted

some golden arches in a woodcut
of the famous Scream. We hang on
as you take each letter & render it

a stranger to itself, like soldiers
in skull masks & bunny ears.
& now we open our mouths

& a parliament of rooks uncurls
from our brains to drink your sky
with one long and many-pointed beak.

Arrivals

Pax Brittanica. Aminal crackers. Switch.
Pedometer. Clotted cream. Bedside pillow
pile. I shamble along the canal with my sweat
diadem & bad knees. But when summer sits
on my chest, I open my belly in welcome.

They’re airborne in the past but catching up
over a world at the throat of the world.
They’re fragile vowels, poking that throat.
What bridges do to riverbanks, they do to me.

The finale of green holes up in heaven. Its arms
shake. No exit, no giftshop. Its arms shake.
I grow tired as a tarmac, where the geese gather.
Flowing larger and alone. I stay up late.
Stir with my pen the unfiltered cider.

Arrivals extend the horizon with their hands.
This body I’ve scraped together. Sunburst
like a flasher on the sidewalk. Sunburst
tumbles from the bus yard like he missed me.

The Heavens

hitched horses drag a globe of light
we used to believe      in people, animals

nothing beyond our scale, ontology      of one
as if a footprint on the moon
is a human thing

//

above some fixed point      we bank
right and nothing follows      freely

pulled and pulling the thread of being things

right now undressed to spring I hurtle
remember red lights weeping from the wing
and me a half-conscious geranium
with head rested against a plastic window

slipping not past but present

//

The maculate female clucks
with options      into the swarm of air
she sees lunch      buzzing the ditch
and clucks again pregnant with sameness

then spies the rooster absurdly above
surprise landlord of the crabapple

//

with enough tongue      nectar
with a furious flapping      stillness

from my roots I say what is small
and more      solar eclipses blinked
away I believe

my body terrestrial except      bathed
in late light      the visible dust      rises

//

when I die I say      so much
of me will continue its ascent

Buckle

As the milk sogs the bowl of mixed grains,
so comes the too-much, heaving

its own highway before it, disgorged
tarmac, the clouds a trash bag

behind last call. And like a savage
I don’t stop at the perfect. I score

my tongue before it enters
the oven. Nabokov called Tolstoy

a groping purist in the face of too-much,
he could one-shot an ottoman but not

the umbilical powerline and the flat
squirrel beneath it, new lamps studding

the cul-de-sac, the fitted sheet gone
flaccid under uneven weight, the black

sky interrupted by stars. Maybe
our heft is the force of attraction sewn

to the stutters of a rusty Honda.
Our breath declines along the trail

of twigs and down and milkweed fluff,
the bright, fibrous undoing

of a sparrow’s nest reaching for
the sidewalk. What exerts itself upon

the world. To break the fast we must
first understand not-eating as an action.