MOURNING THROUGH SUNLIGHT
Here at the stonewilled farmhouse,
hewed to each stranger's
rules, with several flies
I hover the rooms humming,
wings whirring, motor
organ's
buzzing broken finally
into an oval cry as the baying
hounds start up
(Fragile, the sign says,
Do not touch),
and I'm bonded to the woods
not to hunt, but to be,
having counted from one hundred
to one, asleep. So my dream
of illegal sound, produced
by us in love and trust,
flayed open by a detective's
pointy talk. And the woman
picking peaches who reached
their tree from a tightrope
in the lone blue
silence that turns,
late afternoon,
as the weather staggers on.
+++
READING PATERSON
Of the doctor's vernacular
I have no doubt
he was schooled
in his words, but in
anatomical silhouette
his women seem faulted
for every salacious
scene into which
he deposits a man
through a slot.
The rooster's comb,
the water's comb,
both appear to me plaited
over the ocean's plain,
hardly objects, yet I've
found a glossary online
that collects Atlantic
bric-a-brac "by reason
of an act of man."
Doesn't the author
know the sea upon
some gimbaled struts
is not what I want?
+++
GENETIC
Delicate, genetic, the flowers
arrayed in fabrics sloping
from center, a series of tongues
but another movement, swaying
like hair unattached on the underside,
ends held at the axis.
Speaking of mothers,
there are paragraphs emerging,
rectangular, the ladder down to
a green dream underground—
I held a rung with one hand,
the other stuck between my knees.
Panicked, I thought I'd fall from
that form, in grief untwisted.
+++
PAST NOON IN THE MUNICIPAL LIBRARY
I sketch a bird
that turns squirrel,
its bones too broad
for avian form.
Hint of a nose,
scratch for a leg,
its chin points
at obvious wind.
TYPO
29
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