THE REPLICA

The secret is being able not to. Or
Don't do it. Don't cry over the fact of procreation,

   over the
prelapsarian signature . . . How wonderful! They are

Nude in front of it.  But we don't want to write that script--
far from salvation--or even before winter . . . before

   Creation. A
hawk stood on a branch looking down at the owl

decoy. The rest burned down right after the election, but the
view's still the same, now roomless; the paintings aren't gone;

   they're just up
in the sky with the clouds and the rest of the broken geniuses.

BEING OUT OF FASHION

I had two thoughts: obscurity as something that
resists--not the same as difficulty. The smaller the

   better; tongue,
finger. But I want to get (in) there. concussion:

under the spiraling Jesus.  I could be in Lansing, Michigan,
off-cells, the retina has its plan for you (for you in

   particular). "Darkness"
is everything the present tense is not.

G-Force--trying to get to the future so that the present recedes.
I had it also that I might eclipse the imprisonment of my

   own perception.
Tunneling to the other side. It was in this moment--the

conception of fashion, the moment of seeing (knowing) growing
smaller. And smaller. There was pressure on the forehead, the

   knuckles. Both
shoulders ached and strained. An eye lash touched a blood star.

UNFORGIVABLE ABSOLUTE

But we're living, the great released   occasionally
unburied, isolated autocracies   insects bowing

   in rows
somewhere the first dark erased by a candle   a brain scan

resurrected with millipedes   the bone isn't a balloon
an architecture for flesh, the day suddenly warmer   I can in fact

   let go
now   Born unto hands, Surrounded-by-Kin said   an absence of

nudity   your dirt, your disorder, your jet-trails   broad minimalism
of the naked back   the body swaying under   signification stripped

   to swamp-wood--
fingernails, pores   tire tracks; lightning   the cost of things; kissing

GLORY

The air faints; we rise. I was on the feast
rebellion. it's everywhere you place your mouth

   The flower
loves its burst of blood, especially as a consequence

of sin. so once we just said: That's it. Liberty and
zippers. I watched as if I'd come back around looking

   the posture
over from a car, got out with my gloves on. 10 yrs old

was horrified by the unavoidable emotion, how to keep
it in check (or show it) undressing mechanically.

   Please just
look at how they don't have to do it (it takes care of itself)

though it's nice, the one chair. red fingernails pale sea frothing
back and forth, the fur coat pushed there, champagne was what

   I imagined
my eyes. i need a flapping rag to wash this noise, dirt all over the

bottom of her feet. I mean it's survival in action, stirring with a
spoon--interest is accruing, we're sweating over ignoring that fact.

AIR RISING OFF WATER

At Between the Buns you're expected to want
cheese on your fries. Ho ho, only I can count the days I

   spent in
your neighborhood. I smoke when I'm aggravated.

The Dali Lama burps on stage, and I consider making
him a write-in candidate for (something), I want to

   amass a
collection of "personal" poems, door to door, beginning

with the prompt "I fucking love/hate" etc. but throw in
the name of a loved one, some kind of bird you don't give

   a shit
about, maybe a disease (or nostalgia for some appliance

from the past, like a popcorn popper). I want an open-minded
burper to be my personal saviour is really the point, but I'm

   uncomfortable about the
word personal. The good news: no one I've ever met seems holy.

1-800-YOU-FAKE

                         (for K. (you'll never know who your are (which figures)))

What's in this milk shake? Today I encountered
bad cheese. Why me? we scream into the camera on

   TV, smiling
a little, through tears. One of my old passwords was

DOGBITE. Boone's Farm, Annie Green Springs. Ask
your grandfather. I'm sort of fed up with everyone, always

   making plans,
a nameplate flying through the stratosphere, personal

seconds in bathrooms all the time (I'm not a crybaby!), and if
you're lucky a strategically placed barely blurred window so you

   can go
in two directions. The shocking private moments of Karen

Carpenter. That's what I see in a drawer full of mouse poop
and newspapers, the nostalgia of before, right now, after the

   mosquitoes in fact,
but __ years before my (or anyone's) death, still waiting for snow.

EMERGENT AND INTEGRATED

What do you know, revenant, your level of
wakefulness isn't in any fashion surreal, I can see

    the stage
becoming funereal . . .  Under a film of coffee the blinking

eyes of reptiles, a giant squid, fossils of large protozoa.
We are like poinsettias, the hidden anger in the laughing face

    turns into
welling tears, talus pile-up, live bait sinking past the unfocused

eyes, stone precipice—the order of things gets unestablished;
the dragonflies, disturbed, light in a row along a graphite rod,

    each shivering
exoskeleton indistinguishable from another, each sparking sunlight

way past dusk. I do believe in this. They said, We're going to start
over again (again). Two pillows, hair combed, two sets of

   staring eyes . . .
Now it’s summer again. Their final months were cocreated.

TWO COPIES

What makes you dig the things you
dig? I’ll tell you what doesn’t. You staring

    past me

again. “That so? Davy Byrne said . . .” doesn’t

address anything. In other words, I’m not your

mother. I don’t care how much you know, for one thing. Try

    to be

more generous. Try to be more generous. You sound

like somebody’s mother. The two of us sat

staring into our fluctuations, our desperate faces

   a discontinuity.  

THE DIFFERENCE. THE STILLNESS

Maximum leaf color, red mostly, but there is
no sound. The waterfall is silent, the mosquitoes fill up

   with blood
I can't visit this beach anymore. The golden eagles

keep substituting for bald eagles, mortals live in white
plaster, encased. The jug sat on a stump for years and

   migrations took
place inside it. Music resulted from breath blown across the

lips of the stem. Deep in the dark forest, behavioural patterns
were discovered in feathers, everyone brushing everyone's hair.

THE ESSENCE, AND MEMORY

Art, the act of water skiing: ginger's subtle, exotic
spiciness; but earlier than that. The flight of

   the elephants.
All this is closer to what is. Or from.

They call it a train box, maybe a bit feminine, open it
and you begin a line of what's important, the past with its

   telephone poles
(I think I can see the future from here) and anxiety (the

clouds hang low; he slaloms right toward them, if he can't
do this everyday will I die?); I wake up sodden,

   my spine
a bridge over Cress Creek, that ice at the bottom of the

world. But I was too there then, and only the people
watching remember me grunting. Those sponges.

VOCATION


It's not elastic. The Bible that cracks open
is glue, integument, tree bark; a book full of love and

   death. Insecurity.
Stir the plaster of Paris, or whatever it's fucking called,

until it comes. You're a presence from your hair follicles
down to your anus. Thank God you learned to

   play drums
while the others were mapping out their careers.

THE DRAG STRIP

I keep falling in bed. This is old, old,
always, the happiest garter snake in

   Cincinnati
I walked out onto a deserted drag strip last weekend.

I thought of Mondrian and Pac Man,
I saw the herons guarding against intruders.

   The night
stunk of gunpowder and cognac processed by the

liver. It was residual, I guess, redolent of being human--
and dying--after rising out of dirt.

SPIRITUALITY

Genuflection comes, it dries on the skin,
it fills the air outside the face with plumes--

   it oscillates--
The man holds onto her, thumbprints on the delicate

wing feathers. And the way she moves around him is like the
emptiness inside a manta ray, the deep black sea, intersubjective;

   I want
to craft an interruption, some sinsemilla in her eyes. Or twist down

looking while digging up the green; the bullet seeks a closure. A
final kiss. I wrote my lucky number there . . .

CONSPICUOUS LACK OF BAD ENDINGS


I slept on a bench, forty-nine days, getting
stupider, my money back in Ludington, while

   the ferry
pitched. That was ok. Later the bulls ran loose on the

country roads, and once I poured milk on her
bee stung rib cage in a burning barn, pigeons roasting,

   the moon
on her body; the days it took to fall through North Dakota

and come back out sensitive, shackled with the masks
we took to wearing, mine portraying teeth as if

   the lips
had been ripped off, hers graced with the image of two pried out

eyes. We rested near Dead Colt Creek, stripped to nothing from our
necks on down, fog rolling over the bones in our hands all evening,

   a catalpa
shifting a little wind, a boat in a dream; a convulsion.


 

MOUSE


Good reading at Fiddlers Sunday--poems by Neil Kelly,
Rebecca Pelky, Charmi Keranen, Jeff Tatay (and his nephew!),
Jordan Eash, and others. But I'm really here today because I have
a mouse running around--a little black fleck of a thing--in the
kitchen, living room, etc. It likes my bags of bird seed for one
thing.

I'd normally let the thing be, but the "droppings" that eventually
appear are a deal breaker. Only problem is the traps, the usual
wood and wire contraptions (one thing that hasn't changed in 50
years) aren't working, since they appear to be geared to a variety
of mouse somewhat closer to rat-sized. My mouse keeps stealing
the bait (peanut butter) and pooping right on the trap. I'd be mad
if it weren't so fucking cute.

MIDNIGHT

There are metal

fences, classes cancelled,
snow drifts moving

across the road. Dusk

in the morning, the
numerous stars

seemed to be piled

outside when you
woke up. One last

cigarette.  Chain-
link, dogs roam the
junk yard, one last

walk to the store—
cold is just such
a condition.

Nothing moves for
years, you walk through
the cathedral.

After you cross

the train tracks you

climb over the

fence still sleeping.

HELLO NEVER-ENDING-NESS


"Pigs suffer too, I said to myself, and immediately I regretted
that thought."

ORCHESTRATION

                                     --after Lars von Trier's Melancholia

We can't see past the face, wide plastic
shell with white lips . . . The matches are for lighting

   furnaces, a
child riding brainless in the belly. Lace passes through

these frigid constellations, jewels breaking
in pearl river water, the heartbeat a rock-on-rock

   echoing of
sound, a trembling of leaves, the fawn smiling

with its neck broken. I got up from my usual stadium
of green and moved from wall to wall like feeling was

   a game
played underwater. At the end of time all the colorful birds

will colonize what's supposedly heaven, bleeding into
one long trail of planets barely missing other planets.

PAINT

I don't "experience" business, don't know
how to lap it up, can't stuff its straw into my

   mouth. I
don't know how to tell anyone Submit to this--

"the RN believes the doctor is an idiot pigtailed
in kindergarten"--unless it's full of broken eggshells,

   the stink
of old paint, a little wind perhaps, peripheral with moths

and clogged eaves troughs; the ripped up threads of flags,
a tin of sardines in a coat pocket; I have no idea what any

   of this
is worth. This vocabulary of pine needles and haylofts.

THE BABY'S DOCTOR


To deactivate and unroute the semi-reclined
baby's doctor, unroll a towel.  Unlatch the face,

   first amongst
the carbon-dated vestiges displayed, subluxation

from the kicked off jaw, lost eyes wet behind your eyes
behind your eyes behind. Elucidations. A logical picture

   of facts
is indeed a stethoscope. The trumpet vine makes a

cup, such a tender mouth, looking out through deep well, a bird
in the sky, five branches of splintering light holographically

   meant to
be my world up there, my baby's doctor, the hot sweet shriek

of two squirting kidneys; drink all the fluids you want!
Position the lap part of the belt across your pelvic bones. This

   reduces the
chance of internal injuries, your chest providing optimal

protection from the airbag--a nexus, a concatenation of
names, a wing chair . . . No one should rely on one's baby's doctor.

BELT BUCKLE

Unbuckled, you prick can go nine
ways. He saw the writing on the (bathroom)

   walls. Walls
rivered with condensation, a saturnine burst

of testosterone. My face is in the sky. It's
bleeding a piece of the son. Let me go back to

   the stall:
squid, goat-pig, lunch on a blasting cap,

the faces themselves not involved in the dreaming, not
allowed in the making: like a dog catching a rocket in its

   sideways mouth.
Near toilet paper. I shake and I shake in the stench of

this god's
tiny heart.

WINTERKILL

As well you might, coriander; the yard is hugged
with vermin--blue, blue--every second zooms

   forward: the
death of nostalgia. It's about the framing, isn't it?

Aren't you panting amidst the yellow wings,
death's heads, the vulgar remains from before?--

   Dream is
that a face pushed through it. Darling, it said,

the hair out at sea. Darling, over the gale winds,
she lost her words in the eye of the poor thing's going:

   The fence
that is collapsing, and the worms that are at hand

were a buoyant affliction . . . I dared you to say it,
remember. I couldn't. I wasn't squinting

   or waiting. No
one was laughing; white gums, stitched with nerve endings . . .

THREE RED TULIPS IN LANDSCAPE
WITH HORSE AND RIDER

Under bushes, autos, house stoops
You were maybe fourteen, sixty-seven? If the

   Ostrich leaps
And breaks across the differences, trot-lining for instance,

Trucks and trash in the water, is the velvet hitting
Wire? The girls were often smaller,

   Bigger in the way
A body scopes an issue of another user's body--

Stewardesses, come to the cockpit please
And misguide the pilot, let him know he hasn't

   The skill
To man a rowboat. Standing near your thriving seedbeds that day

In Racine, lights glittering without misfortune,
The jet engines like a lover, I listened to the

   Skeletons drying out
Like flowers opening and shining in a dark apartment.

ANTAGONISTIC

Two rooms, three rooms, forty-five
rooms, and a man fishes for his

   Lighter in
His pocket. The cucumbers look so green

On the white plate. The wash sits in the sun,
clothes just out of the dryer, trees getting into the

   Person. That's
The idea, fluffed with air, how can anything feel

Better. It can't, she says. Someone who doesn't
Like you casts a lure over the lake. He's not going to

   Get anywhere.
One by one her buttons pop like firecrackers.

HEARTBEAT

Sidereally
maybe
rich as something

white
surgical
the afterbirth

ten seconds
is long
enough

wind
nothing is moving
nothing

THE LOVERS


This starts in the flowered hill-scape, drained
Of love, sipping crushed pomegranates. You were like

   Botticelli in
The foam last night, a bolster for my broad meta-

Physical ennui, not even standardized, all messed up with
Sugar and pimento olives. Now the lake-swept

   Breezes rake
Our damp hair. At midnight I put on the X-Ray glasses and I

Looked at you. Seagulls sailed above the house while I watched
You kissing the front of my face with your eyes wide open.

ICE

The bay is frozen outside. It will melt by afternoon. I like when

the ice freezes before snow. Occasionally this happens with such

intensity the clear ice grows thick enough you can walk on it.

Without snowfall fish freeze in the ice (earlier winter die-offs)

and the ice becomes a museum of bluegills and perch, frozen

seemingly in motion, eyes staring, sometimes for miles. I used to

play hockey on Mona Lake (in Muskegon, Michigan) on such ice,

and the constant flow of blue and silver and yellow fish whipping

by as I managed a puck with a hockey stick seemed miraculous. I

thought, this is heaven right here. Transition to: a few months ago

I watched heron swallow a nine or ten pound carp. It was brutal.

I collected snakes as a kid and watched many such hard-to-fathom

swallowings, full of  remorse but amazed as well. The heron

stabbed the carp with its long beak for fifteen minutes, killing it.

Then began the long process of swallowing it. It took over an hour.

At one point the heron simply stood upright, about half of the fish

(its back half, its dorsal fin and tail) sticking straight out of the

bird's mouth. Once it swallowed the fish (I watched all this from

my back porch), The heron's neck swelled to enormous proportions.

It was simply a neck the exact shape of a large carp. I was dizzy

because I'd been holding my breath, or breathing shallowly,

whatever, and then it was time to get back to things, and for the

heron as well, who took a few tentative steps, stopped, looking

across the bay, and suddenly flew away, gracefully, as

beautiful as ever . . .