a porcelain lamb
left dandruff-pale,
taut tracts ‘twixt shiftless silken shrugless shoulders,
glistening haunches hunched in a toddling trot,
and this clumsily trundling pose it’s froze in;
wallowed and bored in what cast’s bequest,
this absent saddle’s spectral semblance stuffed
with simpering sprigs of enlivening lavender
looped with the fashionably tardy or bygone blooms
of a bone-wearied dogwood,
draped with the leather-strung strips of sun-blenched jaw,
wan shards of a shattered hip,
an intransigent mesh of darkly peakéd bark
like chicken wire’s ribbed and feathered with
slouching scowls’ stiff, char-encrusted lips,
still puzzling boards of jade and jet,
a bewildering tangram whittling wriggling fingers
unraveling thoughts fordid or dawdled
to irascibly blasphemous pallors
still stickily pimpling threadbare splines of bone;
this svelte crone old cronus had cribbed upon,
sourly stripping in spiraling tails of unplumbable acid
these shapelessly cherubic cheeks
to the rawed and pockmarked jaws of rebellious changelings
following still but chalk-frail lambs and ewes;
still stalking the slippery efts about breakneck rocks
to strangle these truthful fey from but brittly bloodless stones,
to mill among molten stocks some sharply susurrant totem’s
coldly expectant glowers froze as the curative blooms
that hunching herbalists carefully cradle in carrels,
in cuticles loosened, pulsing paunches, plastic slats of ice unnerved,
perverted and riddled with ageless pistils—
What blossoms screw around hollowed spines,
this luridly violet veil of monkshood,
orange and ocherous coxcombs spread
along delicate ribs of careening columbines
cramped amid scree of precarious cliffsides,
flesh-tinged, murmurous-lilac diadems
rose among crapulent, skulking hordes of clover, or
lavender propped in brittly baying bunches,
skirted in sun-muddled shreds of but
vernal and virginal blossoms burst
and sloughed between snorting, suckling roots
and adventurous timber slumped with defecting fruit?
What petals smeared between papery heraldries,
leached from ruddled and squamulose steel
these withering shrouds of severed leaves,
these thumbprints limned against blistering vellum,
these laughably flaccid birthmarks peeling,
dandruff brushed from a fizzling sunburn?
What porcelain lamb
should shoulder such redolent burdens,
as singeing threads of English Leather smudged
a tacitly quickened ken or the musk of
sole-softened concrete smothered in oily abstractions
summons the cold and tumultuous tone of a
frenzied father’s crazing catechisms—
some heirloom fruit of a frog’s throat throttled by
closer and closer shaves some shapeless son’s bequeathed
in an undulous rebar, stubbornly rusted coils of pig iron
pinned in a dizzying rite amid cardstock temples,
garishly anchoring payots,
misfires pimpling paper impressions of asses,
tailless, frailly unfurled, a primordial talmud
blankly taped to a bolted door
or the waist of a prelate?
What bearbaited cherubim chained to dissembling dogwoods,
thrawn espaliers estival stalks suspend and
buttress in brambling breakneck branches,
bust on pilasters bruised and half-uprooted,
perched on erratically hispid hunches pitched
on inosculating spines of sows and shoats
slumped rooting in static spurges—
This black-hearted hymn of a braying bastard
pinned between balding stocks
on a splintering lintel,
limp as a sturgeon’s spine;
or the lavender saddle
alighting our dallying
lamb’s back burdened by boutonnieres
unpainted, pluperfectly pale as contented ash,
as chortling smoke unwound
from a felled and firecured dogwood’s only
abluted, ablated, and burned-out pall—
I should really give my mother a call.
