If I take to my drill and tin snips,
cut slits for my eyes in a bucket
of galvanized steel;

If I fashion from spent, inked
aluminum plates the newspaper
doesn't need anymore
a flimsy laminar armour;

If I stride donned in these and
perhaps with a blade of splintering
moulding left after the renovation
into the yard to hack at the vile
violet hyacinth blooms
laying siege to the aging tulip,
presuming to take the edge
gardens by attrition,

would you see as once you saw,
my sweet Dulcinea, the quixotic buffoon
so deep in delusion,
so madly in love with you.

Dirt don't call the lightning
blue or femoral.
In a furious upstroke
my mushroomed spine
explodes in the crown,
splinters of bone
and black lit pumas.
Driven to hell
through a straw
and all the trees
are dead on the road.
My dry lip
adheres to a dry gum
and my teeth are broke
and purple.
The lyrics are garbled
and tongue-spoke.
Guttural curses
cling to my head,
both hands holding
back the temples
of past myths,
lies and discontents.

Marriage of heaven and earth -
strike down, down, down,
that I may shut you up.

We got 6 bars and 6 churches,
each with similar congregations.
You might say we got that perfect
balance between grace and humiliation.

It doesn't end there, though.
We're run by a council of six,
if you include the mayor, Orin,
who lost the state election
because he couldn't represent
a cow if he had
crayons and construction paper.
He's got some creds,
if you take into account
he built a tractor museum
in a train depot
moved a half mile down
a minimum maintenance,
travel at your own risk road,
frequented by the hormonal.

But I digress. Oh yes,
we have a council of six,
each from one of the six
similar congregations,
each from one of the six
houses of libations.

However, every first Saturday,
they meet, informally so to speak,
under the torn tarp at Ernie's,
next to the beach volleyball pit
nobody uses, between the dumpsters
and the railroad tracks,
to discuss matters too urgent
for the formal published minutes.

They crinkle their Grain Bin cans
like phrenologists picking
out small crimes that paint
this town true, rural,
downwardly mobile,
cordoned off at the rim.

Few years back, they annexed
Bob Olson's back forty
for one helluva football complex
for our losing team. GO DRAGONS!
But we gotta have it.
Pay itself off in five years they said.
Rentals, events and all that claptrap.
Gloria walks her dogs on the track
everyday. Return on investment.
R O I.
At least she picks up the ****.

Third and Main got ripped up
a year ago last April.
Ain't been paved yet.
I suppose we're waiting
for those more appropriate
appropriations to accrue.

But that's alright,
we saved a fortune firing
our Andy and Barney PD
while Andy was in Afghanistan.
Don't know how they got away with it.
We get two hours of laws a day,
Deputy Dawgs, and meanwhile,
somebody's siphoning gas.
Pretty much sure it's that Keiser kid,
can't hold a job anyway.

I thought better of mowing the lawn today.
I looked at it a bit. Betty, across the street,
is giving me the side-eye as she sweeps
harvest dust from her shingles.
Well Bets, you fussbudget,
I'm working two jobs,
six days a week,
to live in this runt of a town,
so back the hell down.
You may be eighty and spry,
but you got five, count 'em five
courters with John Deere riders tending.

You see, here in the heartland,
where politic is a game played
with cheap beer and hard glances,
where the clapboard houses lose their paint,
where the new, polished surrounds
of seamless siding dictate appearance,
priority and expenditure,
where the churches and bars conspire
to define reputation and aspiration,
the manure-booted men
are denied the dignity of manure
for a sham - for a show
that barely covers the crust and wrinkles
of a town dying slow.

Nothing more than wiper slap -
smear light on a ***** windshield,
starbusting streetlamps through
pitted glass sliding
greasy on the bridge:

Every billboard passed,
every sign every whine,
every slumped leaning
off ramp neighborhood,
a blurred jagged vision
of what it is, what it was,
what it might be,
gone.

Though some hazy refracted,
gray on gray beam,
from out there, back there,
through the pupil to the retina,
focused occipital,
turned again into a shape
that wasn't hers to begin with.

But there she is,
behind a salt-crust window,
half-eaten by the blinding slats,
a perfect, distorted slouch
in a booth of vinyl bygones
off exit eighty nine,
with a bucket of fries
on her hands,
while I spit by
on a wet highway
to who the hell knows where.

I used to live downwind of the slaughterhouse,
the one below the high bluff where the state pen towers,
commanding the best view of the marsh lands
and the stink ponds making lime outta ****
for the crops not meant for human consumption;
by the dry grass parks with the broken backboards
and the netless hoops that never slow a ball down.

I used to live downwind of the rendering plant
where the bubbling lard becomes aerosol
and the air reeks of freezerburn bacon and feces,
below the high bluff where the trustees cut grass
in the clean air not meant for the locals
mixing with the immigrants and loser folk
who have knots in their shoelaces that
press against bone when chasing a loose ball.

This town never grew up. Doesn't need to.
There's plenty of ground for the taking.
Plenty of farmers selling out to the downtown club
who cobble the streets in past time fashion,
netting big gains from the professional set
lining the smooth roads annexed to the east.

I used to live downwind of the closing in stink
of renewal, where the cheap rentals and struggle
stores with the marked-up Walmart brands
lining the shelves - expired but still edible -
bide their short time compressed and diced
up like leftovers for dogs.

But this is America. I don't live there anymore.
I got myself a cush gig with a padded ladder
to the top. Did everything I needed to do
for that sure climb out into a cleaner air,
only to find myself bruise-faced and reeling
when the profits didn't match the dream
and the ladders were sold for scrap.

The AAA guide says Jesse and Frank James
jumped Devil's Gulch on horseback to outrun
the Northfield posse. A must see locale.

Though that story has largely been debunked,
Splitrock done built an small tourist industry
around the myth.

Gordy sits all summer long in a cabin
with no A/C, black flies on the screens
like dog hair on a furnace filter.

Gordy sits all summer long in a cabin
with a couple Coleman coolers filled
with all the best brands of soda,

Hawkin' the t-shirts and postcards
he didn't sell last year or the year before,
but that's ole' fly-swattin' Gordy.

He keeps a list of the origins of tourists,
that's all his talk down at the Sports Cabin,
where he sits all winter long.

Between sips and drips of foam above his lip,
he'll say "Norway, Pennsylvania, Mississippi,
Japan, Iceland, Kansas..."

He might ask you if you're gonna eat that.
The pizza got cold anyway - so why not.
Plus he knows what Gloria did yesterday.

He gave a '57 Chrysler to his 10 year old granddaughter,
but she lost it after the divorce.
Her dad signed the title and left the state.

I guess that's about the state of things around here,
disappointed tourists, skunked out beer,
cold pizza, the little girl who lost her
dad and her car on the very same day.

Fist upon the sun gods.
Seek among the goddess earth.
Chant and clang before icons:
oh please, good fortunes,
new birth and wealth.
Sacrifice a goat - the blood will dry
at the foot of the temple.
The blood will dry
and still no rain.

Scream into the night
for a pittance of hope demanded
and stir a neighbor's peace
a dog's twitch into soup dreams
of portent and panic. Yes,
that, once done, bestows
upon us the riches, the riches
the ancients cached:

Dishes wash smoother when soaked.
A grain in a bowl is not empty.
Basil brings life to bland fare.
The herbs of spring strengthen
once dried and stored for winter,
and the yeast of us rise unto heaven.

The day you called me ****** lover
was the afternoon of my dissent
from the back alley boys club
and rolled dungaree territories
marked off down where the long
lines of chain link bend right
where the churchyard intervenes
between us and the snowball stand.

You might think you whipped me tight
but my decision to include a new friend
that dipped jars in the crick for tadpoles
behind the brick young family roads
was mine to make and that black eye
and ****** nose to this very day
this very night remains.

Don't be knocking on techno's door
for a shot of stale whiskey and fond golden
shots of what we were when we weren't
and will never be. Yea, you posted
that pic of the back alley boys
shirtless, hairless, rolled dungarees
all smiling like jack rabbits on the run,

But it was Michael, Michael that showed
me how a tadpole becomes a frog.
It was Michael that rode the Comet
at Hershey with me, alone, because
we couldn't or wouldn't run
with the back alley boys who still
don't know what they've done.

She hates mushrooms
says they smell like dirt
and grow on **** and darkness

She hates green beans
because her thumbs still ache
from seven summers
snapping tips

She hates kale
because she don't wanna
chew for days
and her jaw clicks

She loves onions and garlic
the baseline
of everything going right

She loves the sweeter cabbages
melted down in bacon fat
topped with snap peas and walnuts

She'll cook for anybody
willing to listen
to her sizzling grease

She'll caramelize your mind
question every savory intention
every bitter herb in your teeth
salt every wound till it sweats
and goes limp in the pan

She travels with her tongue
her pantry her passport:
cumin, coriander, cinnamon,
cilantro and cardamom
in simmering stews of goat
and collard greens.

Her knife has a keen edge
and she cracks the joints of dead birds
like splitting cheap bamboo chopsticks.

Her eyes go wide and silent
at the range
and when the burners fire
the whole world gathers and waits.

My mother loved the dogwood blooms -
each spring a fresh crucifixion.
And when it flushed wild in the clearing,
where our new house stood,
on a stripped skull, quick to erode,
my mother would rush to the dogwood,
take each stained white blossom
in her hand and said "forgive, forgive."

She never went to church anymore,
never again touched her cold dead Mary,
never again begged favor or grace,
not after that first spring
bloomed dogwood,
not after the twisted
cursed and giving lumbers
first sprung upon her eyes -
a crucifixion, multiplied,
a hundred times, a hundred Aprils
on the limbs of a retribution.

It’s fifteen below
And a fat buck lurches,
Spindle legged, four pointed,
And cardinal -
Fishtail and brake.

I don’t trust this road.
I don’t trust these tires.
I don’t trust these ditches,
Smoothed and driven with snow.

I’m a six-layered pig at the wheel -
Unsleek unchic -
But I’m warm, **** I’m warm,
And the road slides like pinstripe
On white gabardine.

And the waning moon,
The waning moon,
Low in the rise,
Gibbous and garish,
Scabbing a cloud,
Spills the whole thing blue.

I don’t trust the red eyes of mailboxes,
Always willing to dive the grill.
I don’t trust the farmer
That lives on the hill,
Behind the blue spruce line,
Behind the blue flickered window,
Counting on futures,
Clumsy as mittens,
Still as the finger drift
Thudding the glide
Like dull scissors
Snagged in gridded giftwrap guides.

I still taste the coffee
Down under the tar.

I trust my smokes.
Yes, I trust my smokes.
I trust my hat. I trust my boots.
I trust I’ll never find my roots.
I trust the jumpers, there in the trunk.
I trust every single roadkill thunk.
I trust every knuckled ill-advised ride
To tell me yes, oh yes, I'm alive, I’m alive.

A smattering chatter
revealed the prophet
to be a fool - a beggar -
a panderer to fear -
for bread, mercy or
perhaps, if luck
ensued - loose coin,
too much a pittance
for counting.

And upon the city,
the Lord of Wraths,
expunged of fatherly
duties, crushed
upon his children,
the light that was
Beginning.

Acrid wheezings then
and fuming,
ascended the ramps
to heaven
and cast the demon out.

I make shadows with my hands:
some birds, Nixon,
a spider on the wall, a barking dog.
I make shadows
with my hands — momenta,
false tales of you sitting flat
by the harbor, the ease of your legs
dangled beneath a pier. And I make water
in the shadow, some creases on your feet
and you laugh. I made you laugh.
These hands, disrupting sunlight,
know only the loss of you, your neck
and the fictions of some other tide.

Back on the long stone jetty
a time when the smacks came in
splitting the tide with a daily haul -
marlin flags, yellow-fin flags,
shark flags and all on the riggers.

In come the seiners, longliners,
and skipjacks. The crabbers,
the Merry May, Mama's Revenge,
Rock Bottom Sally, all going
bayside with their wares and
worn bows.

Each in it's cutting and bobbing
joy, blows a horn for the jumping
jut-finger kids  - the day done
on the shore when the waves came a' roiling.

The jiggers in for the market docks
and a couple a bucks for the gap-toothed
waterman gathering legs on the rocks.

Two for a steak a' tuna
Five for a pound a' nurse
Blue Marlin not for sale, my boy,
it's for the record books.

To give us naught but bleak display,
To say, to say,
Love has never tethered moon
That way,
That heather never blooms but brays
To drop the stars in sage and grays.

And in this flash hewn verdance sent,
Aghast the sea in violet vent,
Abhors the ******-singed regret,
This skirmish lost though never met.

And where upon a furrowed leaf,
The miner enters as a thief,
To take the blood but not belief,
Was not the time to span a grief?

But given naught but bleak display,
That tethered moon has gone astray,
And pulls not tide but skin away,
To slink beyond a son and pray.

Rejoice!
This sweltering band of pariahs raised
through one hand, one voice,
dragging chain like kitetails,
stable on cloud, though untethered.

The unfed gape,
pitcher plants in empty nests.
Even flies evade this truth.

Rejoice!
Mingle the sweats of our bare naked bones,
lost nosegays, groping green garlics thrown,
half-gnawed red raw chicken ******* blown
out and festering in pits,
garbage cans,
coffees slow whisked to instant
black ground,
whether silken and dazzling,
whether burlap and scratching,
linens that never hold a press,
admit the one stench
that no weave contains.

Rejoice!
All ye cast off jesters and janglers,
jasmine untanglers,
rejoice and submit
to this one sweet stench
that is we.

Her eyes fold gently
as she takes bits of honeycrisp
from my fingertips -
the first from the tree,
still hard, ****,
warm in the thick after rain,
hinting at cinnamon.

Her usual distractions,
squirrel on wire,
bobbing heads of neighbor girls
on trampolines,
lifting reigns of monarchs
and viceroys, mourning cloaks,
slamming doors,  
jumbled voices beyond the fence,
bright musks of night prowlers
in the grass,
all ceased to beguile.

As if desirous of desire,
she stiffened at the first crack
of my teeth through the flesh
of this first apple,
then bounded across the lawn
and sat before me,
not as a beggar may,
but as an adherent
to the rites of giving.

Bit by bit,
taking each with neither lurching forth
nor brushing my fingers with her teeth,
her velvet black ears lain back,
her brown eyes reduced
to sweet slices of rapture,
she chews each in its time,
savoring each in its time,
not as a dog may,
but as a disciple
to Autumn's way
of giving.

I know silence,
I breathe silence,
I am silence.

But when the harsh winds streak
among the ash,
when the leaves are stripped green,
when gaunt tarnished limbs hiss resilience,

I must humbly bow my head,
and whisper,
to the fallen bark and leaves,
lift my petty eyes,
to the bones of trees,
and whimper.

For it is not I
that rises unto time,
it is the coiled fiber,
the heartwood
and sheer elevation
of living into which
I can never reach,
but with clenched teeth
and torn grateful hands,
I climb
upon that
which endures
regardless.

Rain pounds the awnings like Parliament,
a groaning, moaning opposition to the motion
outward into morning.
Rain rustles in the street like referendums,
dense, verbose, broken into articles,
footnotes, addenda, dog-eared.
Drop by drop,
a gavel cracks in a plastic bucket,
the ayes and nays tallied,
it seems the roof is leaking.
But in a narrow victory, by god,
the clarity of water has been struck down,
must needs repair is denied appropriation.

Joy and similar discontents
break wheaten on the all-weather
radial steel-reinforced sidewall hum,
on the defog rasping for a service call;

Break on the near treeless plain
stitched loose to the sky with rivets
of silos and grain bins - clouds
dive porpoise behind the rise.

Joy and similar discontents
hang like flowers on a bleach
wood cross surviving another winter
to tread sobbing on the green ditch water.

Every X and Y coordinate of the plains
etched by gravel side-ways and field
entries too rutted and ragged
to suit the conglomerate need

or the tilt houses and stripped clapboard
banging against the thistle, milkweed
and swallowed dreams in the foxgrass,
with turkey buzzards circling thermal overhead.

But the crows plunge faster into red
fresh carrion sloughs of whitetail and ****
to breach at the presence of a larger scavenging -
and each bent marker tells its own tale.

Count the bullet holes and shotgun splatter
in the stops and yields when the road was empty,
when the night was dry, when the callous boys
had time on their hands instead of hog blood

and badger-eyed girls that left after graduation
for the starless haze, crowded parades,
sidewalk shops, umbrellas on the rain side
of things keeping each at arm's length.

But it was never about the city,
never about the glitz and pizzazz
of everything running baffled into gridlock;
less about the thick dumb flannel boys.

It was always about that low fog,
the night eyes in the beams, the manure, chaff
and split seams of the midwest furrows,
the haybales that bob like rafts over the horizon.

To become fluent
Is to walk with the hands
The resilience of starch
Dried on the steep ***** of the bowl.
And what may seem clean
Is a trick of the eye
For the residue of rice
Resists the towel and scrub
And clings there,
Known only to the fingers
That would seek this knowledge
And ignore the one thin hair
Afloat in the soup, yesterday,
As we closed our eyes,
As we closed our eyes
And savored the broth.

When the eyes are denied a surety,
trepidation beats between cicada wings
and the snore song of leopard frogs,
loud though the singers are small.

For what or whom does the gray owl call,
perhaps, perhaps the end of us all.

We've built upon fire
mechanics of light unrelenting.
But night does fall - never rises -
and with it roars the unrepenting -
a shadow on the wall.

A floorboard creak,
a screendoor unhinged,
even a clock ticks louder
to the brave cowering ear,
counting indifferent
to the sum of our fears.

Me 'r aw gawn a' fer dawn
'cept t'grizzle that passed them bowts on
'n Tangier boys t' young to take t' wooder

Tangier boys and twist knuckle fellers
Gather up t' cafe a'four
fer a soda widda woodermen's beans
'n downa docks a'foive a'clock
for castin' awff lines 'n dreams.
Fer pops gawn out t' bay n' t'oyster beds
over thin lip 'rizon no more t'seen.

Nuttin' but bikes, *****, slap jellies,
'n them ain't hard favored come-ere's
nigh as peas wandrin' the uppards
'til black chug zaust sounds riturn
from Chrisfiel', 'nuther day
jingin' in t'pockets, 'nuther shuck
pall ready fer spoiders  n' hoi wooder.

The ape of reason
wakes inside the primate house
throws **** at the glass
and the gawking apparitions
whose eyes align with his own reflection
but for a few seconds

waits for the one who knows
the one who carries the yellow bucket
stuffed with limp greens
sprung grain and stink meat
to spill the feast on the concrete slab
he calls a pedestal

scratches at lice
his only bedmates
small
irritating
but his own familiar feeders

calling dumb and barbarous
the macaque in the next cell over
calling loud the howlers
calling lewd the bonobos
calling brethren the chimpanzees
who wage war on the neighboring troop.

Short-timer finds time
on an afternoon bent
with wrestling weathers

winter and spring claw
at each others' throats
and uncertain maples
warily release their
saps

Short-timer finds time
on an afternoon wet-shod
in a gray rebel snow

defiant on the nether
side of everything
melting to a smirk
that'll linger 'til
June

Short-timer finds time
on an afternoon shorn
of the lost time spent
dawdling careering

The first time I saw you cry,
even the flies got wet,
worms scrambled like Israelites
before chariots and damp chaos.

I never knew your aunt,
but maybe this was your first
touch of dying.

You told me she gave you Chex
on the brittle days, cookies
on the soft lazy days,

Spoke Danish and laughed
because the horses knew the ways
and all the sisters were named for flowers.

The rocks tumble into the glade,
and all the flowers wither,
even the flies get pummeled,
and the nightcrawlers
drag the mapleseed down.

Same dull knife that ain't been sharpened in years.
But the fingers conform to the worn familiar grip,
between the sweat seasoned tang
and the callous building heel.

Same old blade, same old balance,
that once never bled the eyes
with blasts of sting onion vibes,
now cuts with a thump,
the panic of propane
clings to the nosehair,
with each successive
crossgrain slice.

Same old blade, same old balance,
used to slice garlic thin as almonds,
now gotta lean heavy on the clove,
snap-busting compounds as unstable
as this thin crust hand cracking
the sulphur vents of Vesuvius.

The project goes on.
A few stout beams arrived yesterday:
two boxes of nails, heavy as milk,
two pallets of mud from a swallow’s beak,
three incised jawbones,
a woodpecker’s red tilting cap and the dentine
edge of a falcon’s wing — all ready —
but for the plan — the plan balled up
some time ago on the eighth day
when the crew, weary of the foreman’s flap
gathered at the edge of darkness and light
and lounged: well-oiled, unjudged and striking
— so very striking.

The tabs are listening still
manila bent fat folders
past due bills and debt remitted
collected stuffed and sorted
in the freeze of a moment
when I wasn't a friend
when I defiled a trust
when I spent the last
thin dime of integrity
on a dust filed upstairs
with the titles  brittle
invoices and expired
warrantees.

The phone may ring
to renew the service
between me and you
and I'll drop the handle
into the cradle
of a familiar voice
without a word
without a thought
our crisp linen days
pushed away
while a rusting washer
screams another load
and a cabinet drawer
inches out a little bit more

Down the deer path, thick with ****,
to every hard to find
creek bank in the world,
there's a busted dinghy,
a forgotten sloop dream,
with a mudstuck sprung transom,
a sky beckoning bow,
tied to a cattail or some other
tenuous stem.

Down the deer path, thick with ****,
the willows, reefed in a gale,
cringe in the rising crest,
and a busted dinghy
lifts on a swell and bellows
against the cleat to slide clean
to the sea, to a young boy's
landlocked dream of spray,
hard weathers and anywhere
but here night-watches.

All the colors of elsewhere,
the splendid regatta of the never-seen,
the gleaming spice and bent strange
tongues of the could have been - mold,
dip and sigh, lift and strain,
again and again,
upon a cleat,
upon a rope,
upon a cattail
or some other
tenuous
stem.

I’ll send daisies
because they’re already dead,
bias cut for a few
last capillary pulls
of aspirin-tinged water -
soon to cataract, milky
in a lead
crystal
vase.

These are no “love me’s” or
“Love me nots”.
These are from he who knows
not love, but beauty - decay.

My darling little Aster,
this is the day of your death,
another year counted,
backward from a birth,
as each petal falls as love,
as paper,
as dust,
onto your dining
room
table.

Pull deep these gathered Springs
there, pull deep the wisp
of meadows once dreamt
soft beneath your feet,
and gaze into the yellow eye
about which all these
frailties
fall.

Think not me grim my darling.
Think not me cold and thin.
I am nothing but a florist -
the florist birthed within.

Driving to the lone tree,
the one that marks the right left turn,
the tree full and round,
uncluttered by the muttering
tangling limbs of crowd oak
jostling pine and mobbing
silver maple that snap the wind
into fingers and clenched fists
of hale big as jawbreakers.

That's where the twist lives,
just past the stump yard
trying to petrify, turning
wood to stone,
before the rot hits home,
before nobody knows
where to turn no more.

We found our way
once the willow went down
but it took some time
took some time til
we saw that the redtail
always dives into the same deep
culvert where asparagus
is marked with upturned
boots that never fit anyway

We all find our own way home
the blind Rand McNally instinct
of Get 'n Go coffee stained maps
splitting at the folds.

It takes some time
but we always find a sign
a whitetail spine
or a naked brown christmas tree
or a sag bottom Bud box
thrown, that leads us through the
nameless roads home.

Sharp edge of a coldfront
stands west of Dells,
a rigid lead line on a ridge
where the leanin' broke-roof barn
stands ready to take in buckets.

Ain't been scavenged
for old wood yet,
for picture frames,
sold,
where the upwardly mobile,
shop for the quaint, rustic things,
reshaped for authenticity,
and a clipped last year
wall calendar
image of a red barn
in a yellow field,
below a blue
cloudless sky,
following
the perfect rule
of thirds.

They hung laundries like prayers,
these women, there, new to pants,
between Beechfield and Brisbane.

And all the actions were in the alley,
the zipper between, where we,
young thuggeries in our dungarees,
plied bicycle trades on summer days.
Even flies shunned our manes.

Fists and spit and baseball cards.
Skates and snakes and fenced-in yards.
Each these swinging statues,
thrown, frozen, spun, fastened
to concrete and rash.

And yes, there, the women,
the mothers, pinning towels
like code, pinning sheets on wire,
glancing through a breeze, they saw it all:
saw us, the young and barely criminal,
rang it up the chain.
And yes, oh yes, these mothers,
there'd be hell to pay,
there'd be hell to pay
come dinnertime.

Bob Wilke
excelled at the close up
kind of magic -
that pick a card sort of thing -
great at parties,
when the chatter
is lacking
and the astonished
were a bit off-plumb
and didn't notice he ain't
practiced much.

Now Roy Dennison,
on the other hand,
would pull a maggot
from your nose
if he knew you were lying -
a fait accompli kind of thing.
He always said doves were too big,
too flighty, rabbits nibble his pockets,
and Roy, just too ******
lazy to feed 'em proper.

Emma McFadden,
oh - now
she
had
the apparatus -
that steampunk clinking thing
with exposed gears,
whirling barber poles,
horns that puked blue smoke
and methane, chain,
sawblades and springs,
flywheels and pulleys -
all the things necessary
to rip a body apart
and leave the choking crowd
gasping for more,
always wondering.

Some say they spotted her,
one or two times with a shovel
under that old scraggly sycamore
behind Dennison's place.
That may be the case or
just a bunch of flap, I don't know.
I ain't going back there, though
I do have some ideas
on the supply side
of Roy's maggots.

What a show.
Man oh man, those were the days.
What a show.

"Fifteen miles as the crow flies"
So let's break this down.
You're telling me that a crow
cruising a straight line
at 30 miles per hour
will take a half hour
to reach the tree.
Well I'm cruising at about 70,
got a detour for construction on I-90,
some snail farmer in a combine
thinks now is the right time
to hit the county roads,
and I gotta drop down
to 20 because the paint
and the rise say passing
is no bueno, and he ain't
waving me by.
The crow,
on the otherhand,
is getting mobbed
by eastern kingbirds
not liking his shadow
on the nests.
And yes, that bloated
skunk is fine feast
for a crow flying
as a crow flies,
hopping to a fence
when the implements
pass tall and reptilian.
Given that and some quick
calculations based
on what I remember
from my high school
geometry class -
Pythagorean Theorem
and all that -
the crow and I
should arrive
at precisely the same time,
******* and hungry.

Down by the mud banks of Skunk Creek,
checking out the meniscus up the water strider's legs,
waiting for the bullheads to spit stones into a Roman mosaic,
hoping the undulating green algae would flow auburn
like the hair of Venus blown by the wild gawking turkeys
in the tall grass. But that's another museum.
That's a different day in the gallery
below the bur oak bowers
where the cottonwood seed floats on a breath
as if examining the probability of falling too soon
upon the water.

On clear days it rains buckets,
swelling the headwaters
and the algae blooms gluttonous.

Rufous clay breaks into wider trenches
and the towhee flashes away.

You never flinched when I crushed your hand
on that first day on the ****** rise before a charging
buffalo sun, gnat swarming my wild panicked eyes,
giddy with each hill blue upon bluer receding.

I'm a woodland kid, baby, creek crouching
with roots and canteens of sassafras
in the leopard light and leafmold;
the wannabee Tarzan swinging
on wintercreeper vines.
I'm the scurrying rat in the stormdrain,
taking the shortcut home for supper.

But there you were, straight as loblolly pine
in the canyon lands of Chicago, prairie drifted
in with the drifters and the hawk winds
of winter to find the woodland kid dragged
blind before the gridiron sky.

Two rivers led nowhere, two rivers
and a chance confluence of running
merged and pooled in a one bedroom cave
on Belmont, hatching our tadpole dreams,
fattening the swimmers with mustard greens
and gaudy hotdogs.

When we crested the banks,
on the continental divide,
one to the woodland, one to plains,
the water ran as waters do,
and as in each great story,
the boy follows the girl,
to the ****** rise before
the charging buffalo sun,
where you held my hand
and I saw the sky for the first time.

No longer the measure mechanic,
the setting lever and loosening coil.
The need for fingers, precise,
laying thin metals, tweezed gears
and spring engineered
in the knowledge of frictions, is gone
and towered hands are still.

What once was built entropic,
cuffed about the wrists of us,
this clutch wheel of grace and holding
ring, this yoke and winding stem -
mere baubles to the collector.

For now the hours are true decay,
half-lived and radiant,
taut with the drip of what is
and what must be known.
And that bent clockman,
hunched and relic,
stern in his craft, compelling
WIND WIND WIND,
fashions jewelry for peddlers,
but not I.

Which river to cross -
The shallow brook of faith,
Tepid in the slow run to God, or
That which drains into the oily pits
Of loss, tormented though alive
In sure and certain combustion?

Give me fire and hard current,
Give me love and rounding stone,
Give me rasping scale and snag,
Jagged rapid bends,
And the black swamp moccasin
Bite into my fat ripe shin.
For that is where I’ll meet you.

And what is more sacred
Than knowing true pain,
The poison of it -
The broken limb, the broken heart,
The breaking rind and taking,
Taking that what is broken
And breaking,
Into a broken hand
And tying pain to pain
And thus healing
As long slow scabs
Conceal the wounds.

I will not confess my sins, no,
But burn them in the river to Hell.
I will struggle - with you -
the orange-tongued waters,
Grit-toothed and unburdened,
Dragged a half-mile down,
Until we reach the ashed
And muddied bank and fall
In the gray and muck of living -
Laughing that we tried at all.

It is the peeling that breaks me.
It is the skin once a thin bastion
against dirt, against mandible,
against the boring small things
that blister the flesh, brown the pulp.

And as I slide a blade into the onion,
wincing in the sting of sulphur,
these fumes of disdain, it yields,
again and again, to the rocking steel,
humming unto the butter and pan.

But it's the peeling that breaks me.
Thin papers loose as sunburn,
loose as ribbon unwound
from the core, loose as young men
bound for the shore, loose as a living,
a living no more.

The bereaved must sing to the passed,
must wail upon the deaf skies our frailty.

Given just moments upon this crust,
like toothsome bread to savor until swallowed,
we must praise the baker his craft.

There is not a noise we make
more truthful than the chewing,
the soft crumb yielding to the jaw.

Put an ear to the loaf to hear
the children's song of the womb
in faint wisps of steam and contraction.

Yes, the bereaved must sing,
must wail upon the crust and the crumb,
must howl upon each sawn slice,
must sob, perhaps stoic and silent,
upon the torn, chewed and swallowed frailty.

A prairie skink on the edge
warming his stripes
on the granite palisade -
crystalline quartzite
redder than the short sun
amid the prickly pear
above the cling trees
and cliff swallows
swirling for the bugs
from spit mud hollows
twitter down where
the snapper lifts a
stone head from the
murk still water
below the falls
logs cans and tumble
down rocks and ******
dams until the blue
tale fades away.

Dogfish bait and a late teasing wind
slacks the line, the one binding
monofilament of time
and lost momentum
sagged from a raft adrift -
waiting -
and never enough
to sum the formulae,
the vagaries,
vicissitudes,
uncoiling from the reel
set with loose drag.

A stag in the sea still drowns,
still thrashes until the rack
goes down
one
last
time
one
last
breath
before the flounder is spitting
hair and bone
and the titanic hulk
becomes the soft stuff
of mollusks.

Iridescence on the neck
of the boat-tailed grackle
is a trick of light.

Much the same
as the swirled acid
rainbow slitherings
of oils on water -
slick - metallic
the call.

Much the same
as the prismed arches,
aloof,
heavy airs slashed
by gut level
blades of low suns -
never there, but chaste
and chased by the eye.

The blue jay hoards
no pigment blue,
but gray conspires
the barbules,

interlocked
to lift the remains
of the speckled shell
under any light or lack,
slackened back,
flashed on limbs and wire:

back to the clutch,
back to the hatch,
back to the wide red cups,
back to the ratcheting call -
the screech of all things blue.

Herefords lying down,
***** to the wind - this bodes of rain.
Cloud gray and anvil,
clobber shot and some ways off,
a cliff falls precipitous.
There's manure in the air
because it's November
and the harvest is in.
There's manure in the air
for the fields need a feed
before snow tangles the greeds
of Autumn, and the Aberdeens
crush stubble leeward,
beyond the spruce breaks.
And there, atop a shaved hill,
a misthrown cone of gold,
shoveled by the shade hands
of gamblers in the **** winds
jangle in a pickup.

Wind, don't speak my name,
no squash blossom thunder,
no snap bottom rain.

I ask but a breath on dry tinder,
if just for a moment,
tender as velveteen fumes
between whispers, before a kiss
and her slow setting eyes,
while I, remiss in attending to time
and teeth, look back to the fall of things,
to the flint and the steel of things,
into the dull spark of advents
birthed into this chair,
this cigarette, this coffee,
this rolling silence,
to know that I,
if only for a moment,
have lived up
to all that I've burned.

She chucked herself from the library,
Five stories blind and hung briefly.
I heard it from a friend.
                                    Laura’s dead.
She found three dead boys,
Hung from cable
                                    and that broke her,
He said.

We threw empty sixteens
From the roof where we gathered,
Spoke each a shattered dream
rushed upon the pavement,
One,
Upon another.
The sidewalk gleamed
In all the shards of Laura,
Green and Amber, Blue and Clear,
And ever farther than the eyes of her,
Splashed out in every blink night town,
In every flick night river where
Everybody drowns.

I stared the crowd down squinty,
always squinty,
a jaw tooth grinding, neck vein
throbbing squinty.

I ****** the mike like a baseball
and spit the windscreen drenched
with naive codified lyric.

They took it all in.

The blender chewed them
to a fine puree of sweat,
bodies and stomped glasses.

And I eyed them squinty,
angry less at Reagan,
angry less at their sheepish
individuality, less
at proliferation or the grim
disparities of class or color -

more so at the soap
in my hair that gave me spine
and drooled stinging into my eyes.

She had a long bore smile,
a smoker's laugh,
and a posture born of whips
and taking it.

She had a red onion mind,
a carrion wit,
three prison-ink vines
on her hip.

Her scent - a pudding
of ash and caramel,
hints of road ****,
burnt rubber and mint.

She'll cut your face
for a dime of truth
and slim recognition,
but not a penny for dancing.

She read Proust
and hated it,
spat on the spine of me -
dropped me a notch.

Soft-shouldered for gizzards
she was, taut in her loves,
tight with the greenbacks -
she called them gloves.