How a pufferfish, stripped
to the bone, recalls
a collusion of jacks
holding gossiping congress:
the robin’s throbbing origami grace found
picking off crepe paper butterflies—
Goldwyn, mousy and moth-brown, milking
her pancreas fickly over death’s doddering
doorstep, knocking,
is anyone home?
while the laureled catalpa
wets its bed with
sun-fluffed flowers,
like sulfurous match heads,
spent in a crapulent pyre
we dare not mutter of, sap
grown thick around plump and clunkily
carouseled thumbs—the gums gone
bubblegum grey and the barbels, electric,
eclectic, mistook for mere locks now,
pedicured, tasteless baleen broom-bristles
picking at what rough, rustling
static emphatically tousled
to gormless noise.
If only she’d note
but the nose of it,
rooting through
frazzling auburn
lilacs auguring
something akin
to the gamboling big one—now,
how the pufferfish bloats all
its near geodesic bones around
what frail, airy, and faithless fear?
The answer might curdle
a sugar- or glass-flecked foal
into splintering, bald, indigestible
driftwood, framing
abounding presence as guts, but
humus seduced from a Trojan condom,
jacks snatched deftly with one fell swat felt
gashing the palm into possible, throttling, even
Dickensian dry rot*.
*defined by the
uncommercial traveller’s ravaging
night walks