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THE DRYING BARN
Its air-filled bones
its wide slats
Wanting to levitate
flashing in code
sucking the sky through
All around, like solitary horses
You approach one, in a car, say,
going thirty
The black boards vertical,
faded, more like coal
And the lines of light like sparks
rotate, twirl, at first slow
Like those flat devices
you push while you run
then hop on
Then flash: those metal twirlers
you pump from the bottom
Wild to communicate
Causing you vertigo
Causing a prodromal aura
Making you want to seize
or praise, and tell
in Approaching Freeze, 2003
SPEAK NO EVIL
Try this experiment: on a fog floating night,
October, outdoors, on a white balloon,
shine a light.
Shine it hard on the open indigo eye,
then on the tight red lips.
See the whole ghost flick and flash
from chill blue to bloody brains and back.
If there are many of you doing it,
hear the weird parade shriek in the gloom.
Then the ghost pales to white.
My mother cannot remember one bad thing
about the grandchildren.
There is much to be said for denial.
The crackle of your irony,
the long sigh of your inhalation.
To reach up into you, savagely pull
your youth into my chest, smear
myself in it, as you pulled
the purple clots
from between my legs long ago,
and painted your belly.
For one week only, the painted sumac
touch their fiery fingers in the canopy
above the narrow loop
into the marsh.
What a fine wedding they would make!
Now, they are ash to touch,
like those old people
trembling into the car and sniffling away.
How could that driver be my father?
I want to pack all this in a getaway bag,
with spare underpants and comb.
I want to roll like a dog
in the leaves piled high for burning,
delirious in the wet, sweet, rot.
in Poetpourri, 1996
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