Forevermore fearing the near
and familiar, what flexed mirror
ignored in perfected appraisals,
what memories’ moire amid muddling
muscles immured, what panty hose cloaking
a shuddering camera obscura incensed,
what wall cracked, wiggling bone chipped,
just what glair grown grimly schmaltzy and
pudding-skinned, which shrill soles beat
bald about broken stones, all the roads
wrought into a seeping sand. We forget
that sand’s just overwrought rock, though
notice it bulge in the fringe of a fisheye—
notice each grain swoln, colorful shell shards shucked
from the molten, colonial scurf of a mandarin
duck deemed devilish fetish of fickle eternity
sewing its bones into everything—everything
fetters or feathers or frills, then
Buddy and Ys, the inelegant emissaries of
everything dreamy and preening, just peeled away
free from a shadow, inviting me, See, there’s a
teenage possum wove into that tree, there,
see it? They nuzzled a shuddering limb left alive
or dead in tandem. Whereabout, Norman Sexton
echoed again in the
hustling branches, muttering, amber-eyed
as was his birth right, as he was
wont to speak,
(and I, like a nudibranch, suckled)
of how all that gravel and grit
of the railways thickened
his blood and his
father’s blood, and then, old Lao Tzu
chipped out of the blush of a turnip
interred in a polish hunter’s stew, laid out between
here, my duck and my possum, my towering hourglass
poles of eternity, something you’d stipple
in stones on a tank top—cross your heart and
hope for nothing,
I like hanging out
with underestimated people.
It recalled the diminishing dream of
Bottoms magazine, featuring only the homeless,
only the cantering Chincoteagues combed
from the chinkapin dreamscape coppiced to cornmeal.
