that none
should endure.

the mouths
of two gods
at either end
of this alley,

open mouthed gods.

one breathes in, one out.

feels like mine
what they share.

and this dog
pulled into a store
by an owner
whose hand is asleep

is the dog
I once had
behind me

after closing
the shop
to shelve

what I had been shown
by the daughter
of the man
who hired me.

keep watch, he had said.
 
so I brought my dog
and kissed his daughter
on the back
of the knee

while she took
whatever pills
the stepstool allowed.

i.

one crow
watches another.

your father
lifts

the patch on his eye.

as a daughter, you believe your mother
when she says

love only
what lands
what thinks
it can land

on its shadow. love only

the second
crow.

ii.

you are weak
but hold
that man

like a ladder.

my mother's jaw

for it
to become
my mother's jaw

for it to fit
both hoof
and hell

had to drop
not in awe
but dead

and demon

as a sack
of sticks
in a hunter's
heart

and for the deer
to free itself
that womb
of glass

had to bridle
its hoof
that human bit
 
with which
it barters
now
and limps

past small men
touching
stick to stick.

closed mouth
of a shopkeeper.

his finger
an abandoned
cross

the length
of jesus' spine.

forgive
the hush
of forgiveness, forgive
the state
of my house.

we open
early
no light
is first.

we single out
the second
sons
to copy

scripture.
 
the barber
the dentist
good

and absent.

morality
we use it
when two people

or more
run down the street.

we know
it's a bone
rolls down
the roof

     which bone
for years
we disagree.

said they had seen my father waving his arms and that he’d been eating something raw because it was on his lips and he was a different man. said that many were screaming their mouths onto the windows of the subway or dropping their heads between the legs of weak children as if they were to carry on command bowling ***** to the sober dammits. said they and said they so early my ear I had to put it on the table next to a spoon my father used quietly last week everyday of it. began god his forgiving of bears being seen downtown and began I to get very hungry to hear my father mock blowing mock broth to keep it in the bowl.

no bigger
than your hand
a robot
nearby
is dying

in the bed
of a mouse
a mouse

with an odd
belief

beep beep
in the world.

I will say
I am not my father
and you

     I am not my son
and we will hold hands
until we are
so alone
that I

fall ill
and am replaced
by sickness, a boy

I promise
to write

I must remember
it happens not
to me

but to my son

     that it does not turn him
into someone
else    

lonely

on the weekend, we will go to a play.
some will bring their children.
the play will change many lives.
at intermission, I will want to leave.
you will lead the hand of the man
sitting next to you
to my ankle. he will use
the weight of his chin, the lullaby
of his baby lolled head.
I will not be able to hold
the brief kiss of my knees.

to see his hand
you will lift my skirt
from behind. I will ask
that you
be furious.

we believe in the coming
of the white fly-

in the demotic ear
of angels-

that we will enter
the lottery
of ****, else rock-

and clutch
at the neck
of god.  

or swat.

odd, this park.
no pigeons, no
mothers.

tall babies, taller straws.

a man
in scrubs
on a bench.

I've brought bread
and am suddenly
quite sad.
  
if you can't picture
how sad I am
think of your friends
leaning

into the door
of a cane factory
where you've given
notice-

think of them eating this bread.

a late swimmer, touching
one side, then the other.  
night window, this wine.  
a walker, beggared
to the wend of a wheel

loosed from the lean of its car.  
a bad man jawing
a gradient slur
of hand puppets

on another's dark drive.
a second swimmer
I hadn't seen, touching
the first.  same stone
on the pool's bottom-

unmoved, unmoved
by the yaw of the moon.

and notice, in my knee,
pins, toothpicks. randomly.
the kitchen, softer, than recall.
than rain, than book, or empty hall.
than bird, than bee, than tooth
in straw. what bird what bee
I wouldn't know. save sounding
what a day might own. I wouldn't know
my wife has left
but for this brush, its night haired theft:

my wife has left. she wasn't tall. my sons
have gone
to hobble dolls.

made not
into a fisher
of men
my father
pushed off
in the little boat
of his wound-

so filled
the weeping bowl
of my mouth.

not by its neck
my grandfather's
bottle.

his penchant
for the bodies
of things.

were the prayer
of his line
too broadly
cast

he'd say
good fish
and go hungry.

saved
every Sunday
christ
in both cheeks

and fought
all day
drunkards.

     once fattened
a crow
for his son
run off
 
but could not
watch it go.  

once choked
for nine months
a man.

so full
of stories
     I am not like my father

who died
today
in a field.

would that we couldn’t speak
until our bodies
began to fail.

the healthy want me to clarify
what I mean
by fail.

what I mean by speak.

your cigarette
slant

for the stone
in your mouth.  mother

she ******
the blood

of towels.  made I

from a lesser
stone

two birds.  things, like singing,

that didn't
happen.

you have let
again
small birds
land

on your collarbone
to gag you
their empty
gullets

or

you've again
swallowed
a red
insect
and it

walks.  the ink

of your looking
seems
a hammock
but you say

far off
a raccoon
is watching.  a stick
 
out there
separates
on its own

like taffy.  your hair

has mostly
fallen.  three shadows

I will never see:

under leaf, coffin, or strand

of your hair.  when I hold a glass

the faucet
tries
so hard
for milk.  I can't kiss your neck

and that's okay.  I don't think our boy

would've been
silly.

I come in from the car.  I look at the kids.

there are still
three
of them.  I unbutton my shirt

and put on another.  my daughter, my oldest,

has kissed her hand
behind a curtain- but I am not

to know.  their mother

stays in the car
each time

much longer.  in a few moments, we will huddle

at the window
watch her
not light

a cigarette.  her daughter

is also
that strong.

clap for your mother; she eats.

slightly, move that bible.

half your father's eye; allow.

put, in the paper, that you will sell:  dinner bell.

put that it is real, real as
weighing less
when you die.

for christmas, write a letter
to your sister

in jail
for ****-  ridiculous.

a letter does not reach you.
maybe
you hear
sobbing.  the lady with the dogs

she hung herself.  her bare feet

you cannot
stop seeing.  when she was told

she had a son
his death

mattered less.  you wait in the garage

most days
for your husband
to get out of the car.  it turns over, it dies.  he looks up

much like them dogs
looked up
you think

for the one at the end of the rope.

of
velvet crow.

     what moving here
might mean.

that waking
beside you
is old; and land.  that the land
beside you

is asleep.  beside it

a creature
indigenous
to another.

that something
in me
is rich.  not to place

in drawers
used

tape.  that if a train

is crowded, it is crowded

with libertine

balloons.
 
the word chthonic.

     flatlands, or lowered

beds, when we get there

the top bunk
is yours.

good with ropes; the necks, bibles too

of other men.

to the left
he had me tie
a flower.  I used my mother's yarn.  I knew

she would measure, but he'd given me
my second
imaginary

trumpet.

a woman

(mother
of
a fingernail)

kneels
in snow.  a man

we miss
like a film

thinks

(canvas
of
yen)

in a stopped
train
if you listen
you can hear
a moving
other.  any man

in your bed
is you, but

taller.

there throbbed in a bird’s nest a comma.

fly!  the map of hell is burning.

I must finish the sentence my jailer cannot.

god is blind.  but why mourn?  abandon the moon
like a paper
mask.

a mosquito circles the string of a kite.  half risen
there is blood
in a straw.

my son has drawn jesus being killed by arrows.  

I have used my whole body under a blanket.  

our fathers were making bacon, which of them
caught fire, we take turns.  mine runs
out the door
into a silent film
about a pool.  yours
has a wife
eating ice cream.

any judgment in the court of murmurs
repeats.

we will be sad and there will be **** / we will be sad.

if we do not travel, it will be
by crocodile.

in the clothes that briefly kept eve.

her mania
trembled not
before
but during
god-

a whole year would pass
without
an episode

     then three days
she’d widow
for jesus

less than
she can
chew

boys we / had hands / an orange / to softly / pitch

girls they / had oven / mitts / their mothers / missed

dogs would / wait / sometimes / leave

days / like cloth / we’d shed / and meet

I was touching oranges every morning and throwing nightly my head back in the company of tossed off grenadiers.  the hotel staff boys and girls alike would come into my room naked showing their teeth to me as smuggled envelopes.  an oil soaked rope ladder moved with the wind under my window gifting the square shouldered gardeners with black dots deeper than any woman.  if the hotelier was on holiday it would fall to me to schedule any hanging that had been postponed- seven men, one woman, I’m not proud.  I wrote eight poems that year, one for each blade-followed blade of the slow fan sipping at the maid’s diamond drunk back.  when the man I worked for brought his men I jumped into the pool, it was lunchtime, and came up swallowing and came up collared inexplicably by my trunks and for this many raised a glass because it took many to raise it.

I am driving barefoot.  my brothers are crying.  
my mother’s wake

the wake of my mother’s powdered cheeks

is over.  we pass the house my shoes are in.  they run
to one side of the house which makes it lean.  

my brothers to keep from crumbling are sharing bread.
hansel dum and hansel dee.

in the end my mother was mostly an ocean dipped into
by lightning.  

when I was a boy I sat a whole week in plain view
with a diecast car behind my teeth.

if you are one to dislike ‘in the end’ and ‘when I was a boy’,
you can hate this all you want:

a nightmare is a dream the heart is having.

he wasn’t overseas to be difficult.
he had pain in his arm, he thought

he could find a snake.  a cut-off toe.

our insides were still inside the time
that we knew him.  his arm it sorta  

came like a slug you might see freed

from a puddle’s hinterland eye.  slow

like that, wrong like that.  like these:  

hippies and father time.  a mole enters
an infected shoulder:  yours.  a mole

has been your heart, and peacefully.

your mother doesn’t know about the mole.
it’s not in the letter.

free home
to a good dog
other

signs
quite neighborly
side by side

as emptied
drive-in

cars-

pop away, corn-

care
in the world, pop away.

a man has eaten a nail.  he must bed before it’s too late a woman with a breadboard back.  the man’s brother is married to such a woman, but does not know it.  the brother’s tongue is raw and wouldn’t know good eating were it a thumbtack in a lover’s heel.  the man decides to lounge hungrily in the slim wardrobe of his brother’s shadow.  the man will drink it like milk and let it slosh in his gut for three weekends.  the wife will shine more and more light on her husband; she will bend reading lamps around corners and forget she has things to do.  she will have well lit dreams of a man she can sense is behind her.  her husband will run from the light and she will jump on his back.  the man will come to this empty house and he will be angry and because of his stomach he will need to call someone.  until then, imagine we are in a box held by a thief.

in your
sleep that
makes you
blush.

to the readers of fiction

you can
with a hacksaw
save most
of your leg
and its double.



writers of fiction**

was a man
bit a dog
and lost a tooth.

was another man
bit a dog.

same dog.

wasn’t a day
went by
the two
didn’t wake
to the howling
other.

kiwi fruit
can be held
in the mouth
for minutes
at a time
without
causing one

to gag
     I know this
because my mother
is looking for me
in this short
poem

I know
she is a quitter
     she knows I am
asthmatic

fragile

a thief

i.

the inventor of ear muffs
slipping from his mother
to duck beneath the belly
of a carousel horse

his mother with her cotton candy
and his
pressed to her cheeks
calling

as he covers his ears

his name

ii.

the inventor
of the time machine
unbeknownst
to many
or

to all
save his best friend

the inventor
of real time

a murderous fellow
famously
early

in the bed
of a soundman
who has privately

gone to bury
his own

Talent is a mime on a mountaintop* said he who gave me each morning a fork and a spoon.  He had said previously other things but this was the first to which my mother caught me listening.  She took my ear and me with it outside and shoved two cigarettes she’d been smoking in my mouth and told me to chew.  When I did not she worked my jaw herself until the tip of my tongue bled enough to give her pause.  Neither one of us cried and the cigarettes were salvageable.  The morning speaker then joined us obviously hoping for a drag.  The moment my mother hated him passed and she told him what hope was.  

He who gave me each morning a fork and a spoon would not often be seen by my mother.  He and I were late in our waking and she’d be out gathering types of dead bird from the bases of cornstalks.  I’d sit in my highchair and watch him shirtless as he prepared the tools of my art.  The hairs on his back would grow before my eyes and need bitten at the follicle.  He would turn and put his finger in the garbage disposal and pretend it was on.  On was something he never turned it because he said a mantis lived there and what would bite his follicles.  I wouldn’t be hungry then which was good for my show.  He would laugh at the misery of my scooping arms and be full of it and tired and he would ask me to rub his belly while he went to the couch on his back.  His belly the single most reason to keep him said mother.  I’d put my ear to it to feel myself kick and never did stir him from sleep.  Pretty early in this routine some of his belly hair started to grow in my ear and my dreams from then always had a banquet in their midsection.

Careful with my dreams.  Mother said they are kittens and one can bite too hard.  It is like her being stubborn and only calling me boy when most called me boy and girl in equal measure.  Sometimes when boy got the lion’s share I’d long to nurse and have to slap the ******* sound out of my teeth.  For saner things I’d walk the dog with a dog in it.  I had names for both and both were names I would’ve called my brother had I been born.  I once found a sipped at wine glass on the roof of the pharmacy mother later burned with lit stalks.  When the turkey buzzards skittered themselves nightly across the horizontal track of my looking for god I’d imagine my brother skinny enough to fit in the parched tube of his swallow.

Now that I am returning to Shudderkin, the welt left by my larger than life father whipping his belt across the tailbone of Ohio, it is clear to me that what we called a dog was correct only on certain days.  The mongrel keeping pace with my bike, the second name I have for my brother, is not the physical dog a city knows and not country loyal as country wants to, and so makes others, believe.  It is instead more like the talking when one is sped up and words get put together and then are stuck there.  Dog of Shudderkin.  Its tongue does not droop or even wag outside the mouth.  A pinkness has always gone on without me.

i.

     I crumble

chalk
on the black
paint
of a water
holding
its breath
in a single
fish  

     its glass eye
of evolution
and the sound
of god
making light

of his angels
unfolding
as they are

hospital beds     to guide
a piloted

     exhaustion-

flight reminds the dead.  the solo

moan
of a bird
lands
on the shoulder
of a widow

     as the twice devalued coin
          of looking, looks
               on.

ii.

     I wish

I could dream
away
my name, the bad
mornings     spent cheating

     on her sadness

her sadness a jewel

madly
in the mouth
of a thief
some redundant

angel

chewing
the root
of its own
absence.

instead, the two large dogs go game over a single stick. a bucket moves now and then, mouth side down, and because I am high I put my heart to the right side of my chest. I have been told under the bucket there is a dead chipmunk. I periodically believe this, and cannot admit I am stirred by doubt. I focus on the dogs and on the stick I can see. you’ve braved the zip line that runs through the trees and I might have heard your legs crack on the road. I’ve known Ohio to be flat, but here I am. I’ve known Ohio to sound like the young adult Jesus strolling and that’s if I strain. I am afraid to go in the house; I worry the dogs will either disappear downhill to lick you or tip the bucket and be lost.

a man did nothing
but care
for a moth.

if need be, he’d cup it
to the mouth
of a neighbor’s
horse
gone lame
in its grey
little heart.

I am old enough to drive.  I can’t tell you how big my hands are.  I glide or think I glide like a priest and allow a white butterfly to brush the black robe of my passage as I would a woman’s glove.  I place a pair of roller skates in high grass and put my knees on them.  I watch my uncle, because he is mad at my father or because he loves my mother, throw chickens by the neck into the pond.  his teeth clamp a cigarette as if it might leap.  keeping it exhausts him.

entirely the use of his body.  cigarette like a lover only there to sober his hands five minutes.  anything fell becomes the last link of a buried tow chain.  emphysema, the on again off again j-hook of his right heel run off with devil horn.  how lifts, watch him, the blank assigned weight of your firstborn without housing a single thought.  it is always, this, shoe that drops.  a lifetime of work, say it, **** your mouth away.  your mother has tried to **** him; she a lack river.  handless and is not the one pulls him out or keeps him from being.

would not recommend the usual quiet
or the quiet we project,

the necessary
the led to believe
quiet,

not even the quiet
of accurate prayer-

instead, the stillborn baby
into a room of loud colors

into a surrogate room
that is now
smeared

wall to wall
inanely
with moaning-

this is where we are, speak up, we come
with given
thump and wail-

better yet, make it some beast’s
unmoving
tail end
of litter, make the little
one

speak english- yip, mew –

a potbelly
scarecrow
itching
its backside

on a tree
in a wood

where aliens
grieve.

soft pilot
she lands
open field
in a chopper-

it is
not as loud
as chewing
on a leaf-

could
minutes ago
have touched
the bald heaven

head of a boy
naked, in a low
tree, the white

socks
of his feet
dipped
in ghost deer.

the land very well of my tongue but I was asked to know the tongue of my land in the tongue of my land.  doc the veterinarian hired me anyway.  I was to myself in the dog cages and in their runs I would kneel and let the hose seize with water.  I was to myself in the sick and brick room fearful the slow cat would rent with its curl my stomach.  I was to myself when the parrot so parrot told me in so many words separated partially its upper bill on purpose.  was I dumped the dogs full asleep and half from a wheelbarrow into a pit and I in trouble doing it when we were busy.  was I would basket my arms upside down above three dogs a day at most while the needle made sometimes the back of my hand and somehow on that four dog day my chin such that it got me my funny talk and fired and I had to tell my home early dad.