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,
 
perfection defaced to perfection, preening.