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Thunder Sandwich #23 |
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Kenneth Gurney |
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Scrambled Balance the egg on the egg timer— soft or hard boiled; it does not matter. Nor does it have anything to do with fishing on the Susquehanna, Collins' picnic, the red-rimmed sky, the sailors who dress up for a night on the town. Some conversations are steam pressed and other wrinkled, as if we slept in our words or left them in the drier too long unfolded. A murder of crows feast without apology to the mother whose sky-blue, storm- blown eggs would go well with a pint of Guinness and a rasher of bacon— a few greasy smears on the landscape, a small, clear-cut field of stumps and the scar of eighty-nine's fire still vivid on the hillside leave me sitting on a fieldstone, contemplating suicides whose work I've ingested from books. Found, I celebrate the last salmon of the season before the rain; dead on the creek banks for a month what wisdom it possessed is gone into the bellies of scavengers, the roots of berry bushes, and downstream where the water tastes of caviar. Exhaustion Your poison words turned my face from the moon's. I can see the stars no more in your eyes and the fires once lit are long cold. We speak now in half-lifes, metronome fingers assign some sense of accountability and the sand beneath our toes catches the unseen river-god's vague hands where the small motions of gravity drag what's dead toward the underworld. Whose destination do my bewildered feet pursue, layered prints upon the trail of deer searching among the thin air for the broad crevice that begot the valley below. Do not fear discovery. The sandstone bluff where are initials reside is censured by the wind, erased by the sparse ghosts of that unpopulated town— its lacerated walls long bled white, bleached rust open to a dry, biting wit. |