Dog Song
Make me write like a dog
gnawing a bone. Not anger,
but that animation, that knowing
focus and breath. The just as easy
letting go,
down into the dirt, ...
Make me write like a dog
gnawing a bone. Not anger,
but that animation, that knowing
focus and breath. The just as easy
letting go,
down into the dirt, ...
after Forrest Gander’s ‘Deadout’
I.
Procure his bone-dry clay & burnish,
synchronous glide and precision. ...
The children have left the red ball
disintegrating in the backyard.
Half-gone, it’s a dimpled dome
for dead grass, brittle and yellow— ...
& the trees gleam wetly under the luminous clouds
& through a water-ribboned window a child draws pictures ...
I recalled for the therapist a rabbit skin I bought
At summer camp, at the camp trading post,
When I was nine or ten using cash my parents
Sent with me my first trip away from home.
I waited a long time to get the rabbit skin,
Waited in line a long time for the popular item,
The most popular item for sale, and in the rush ...
On the one side
there are hummingbirds
plucking secret fruits
from the tongues of foxgloves
& a shimmering woman ...
I’ve only seen them build nests on underpasses, on buildings, in the shadows of London Bridge— ...
I am soft with healing after
I am luxuriant with good fortune after
I am cloaked by lady beetles a scent of salted olive, my nature after ...
makes simple nests in caves or clefts eats large amounts of carrion
especially susceptible to poisoning was poached almost to extinction ...
for Panella
It was too generous for gunshots,
too casual for fireworks. Our house ...
He came to me in a dream,
wet as a newborn in his new skin.
I readied him for a bowl of bitter world
(the cathedral two blocks away from our flat in the city),
like an invitation I didn’t dare open,
like one long road of night, cold, and hard as hail, ...
Possumtown Neighborhood, Piscataway, NJ, one mile
from the Middlesex Sampling Plant site, where radiation
cleanup from ore sampling in the 1940’s was projected to be completed in 2000 ...
The dead have the whole city to think with
the fla-vor-ice tube the whole tongue cherry red.
Trapped below the lake, the slow sharp breath,
the mottle, the dogskin, the fiberglass, the uncertain ...
“Make a left at the second park,
Because you will come across two parks;
The first one is smaller, and there’s a little courtyard in the middle ...
In the ocean with my brother, I wonder
if I should make my same old walking
into the ocean joke. “Whelp. I guess ...
The air above this man-made
reservoir turns violent
pink each afternoon. This is a tune
on a guitar I can barely
play. I’ve built ...
Our house leaned and pitched in strong winds. The tin roof
a watering can for black snakes wintering in the attic;
the kitchen ceiling had one-tile-in-from-the-wall painted
for ten years, a racing stripe for our speedy remodeling.
The well water turned brown when it rained; Mom made koolaid
in fruit punch or grape to quell our suspicion. Twenty years later,
Sundays my father made us chorizo
we still begged to skip church
four bad kids in line for communion,
recanting silence
Soon I’ll need assurances, a shower, coffee, pills.
In the fuzz of dawn, I’m a bell
and time’s the clapper, rung until
one state of being over-rings another—