Perfection defaced to perfection, preening
What the sun expressed
in my tetchy erector set symbol
set this morning:
A snowglobe, a light bulb, a
skull, or an onion: the eye
like a discoball
alit on a tarpit—
(was that not a poem
enough, no more than a
feather set free in a clown ruff)
the glory of clam-cold
cream uncurling in scalding coffee
was maybe transcendence enough, the mere
image rebuffed to a puckering
riddle one dare might tease amongst
trees or tea leaves, anything,
anything even pretending
it’s more than a mirror for
what was no more
than a mirror—reflect
On the need for feeling
seen amongst sheep and
wolves, just stuffing their
gullets with wool—and
the baa-baa black of the
sour-gut silenced night buffed blacker
by rattling, wiseacre street lamps,
everything under the sun left
cramped beneath what was a
plangently crackling plein air
can-light caught
in abandonment,
birth throes, soul
of what worlds wound
under the snowglobe’s
skull: this
laundress, framed by but
snowglobe spectacles, staked
in a quaint, cracked, clay-cobbled
cottage or cabbage patch stitched
amongst strata of clabbering, milk-
white felt in your grandmother’s
boxed-up
Dickensian
village, then stuttered,
(her halo stirred
like dandruff swallowing
what was still more than a star deformed)
How could I
take pride in quietly
folding fabric
when all my throttling
throat song’s seen
as but hackneyed
distraction gashed across
waterlogged sleep masks,
mocking the moire of the
palisades perched
above rivers and cricks
who had carved them? Echoes
of only those bones bent, trembling,
polygraphs impishly etching the dizzying
switchbacks dandling hermits and hermit
crabs, hunchbacked golems, incensed
by the tang of some beckoning Brombeere
beat from but gum-braced bramble, all
to but hack up the hawkish and hackneyed
scrolls and twist their tongues instead amongst
dallying starlight scribbling what in the dapple of
applestocks stuck still, struck half-dumb in
plumbing from soil and sun and surge what
plump little symbol disturbed to a cinnabar
brick in the Berlin Wall still stammering
thicker than fog sits sprawled upon Had-
leigh Bay—the Beaver, the Butcher,
and Boojums discuss
how the Quilt folds over
and over and into its
hems, now, how many times
to count. Now count aloud all
of the spoils of wool from
which its folds were forged, the
suds and frogspawn pendulous
scrubbing engorged to a lather of
munchkintown minutemen metronoming
pop-gun appraisals of sumptuous worlds
worked back from the discoball labyrinths
suds distend in, down to the throttling, sun-
picked, wind-tickled bone of it—I can
recall that wine-dipped Whitehead willing,
in cigarette-blistered script, that every wight,
once wheeled from soil and starlight, be
but a splinter of stippling hail
or an apple pip stuffed so deep
in the riffling shale or the rubble
of what rough wall raised
up, like glass encasing a
storm-swollen snow globe,
and wonder should all of these words
unfold into anything more than some
salt’s small sea-sodden sleepmask stained
with what it might take
for or make of the marks
or the sigils enfolded in what
seemed less like a birthmark maybe
than moles colluding, drupelet acne,
a freckle-flecked flash of some tacit
astrology puzzle box, what was this
grassstain some slumped, sighing laundress
twists up into a grin or a grimace,
twists up into a grin or a grimace,
perfection defaced to perfection, preening.
