Three freckles above my knee recall
this snickering creature that years ago
bit me—and now I recount in the stars
these scenes of Herzog doing a Marx
Brothers movie. The freckles, which
once were a wonky line, like a nervous
Lacerta now lopped down but to the tail, here
curled to a hard-nosed triangle, much
as those wrought-iron manholes
fixed twixt twinned little courthouses
tickled to taupe with the greige and
indigo veil of another smug, storm-
choked midsummer’s day. The triangular
bite-mark birthmark under the nipple of
which antlered acolyte lashed to the
Devil of gay Marseille’s bright, passerine
talons professing an animal innocence,
wisdom really; would be a far better
comparison. Swineherd of psycho magic,
Jodo argued the pockmarked triangle
furnished a sense of what’s spirited. Thereby,
I picked through even the faintest of freckles
the sun and my mother had grimly bequeathed,
and settled on stirring the caul to astrology.
Why should the black-eyed sky be the only
probable parchment one might muddle with
meaning; why shouldn’t we also allow all the
half-spent bodies to augur and domino all
of the coy goings-ons with us, gnawing us
back into blister-packed gobbets of trident; and
who wouldn’t read among everything preening
or static like sluggishly slavering stone, the
trees even furnishing more than mere furniture
music, birthmarks, tea leaves, stars, yes—
everything, even the throttling cars, seems
utterly moaning and buoyantly overwrought here
and here with the treacly meaning you’d pardon
your scars with, meaning dug deeper than freckles and
birthmarks, feldspar flexed to the breakneck breath
that should shoulder our gods and Walpurgisnacht’s
goblins.
