I am a cold lamb in need of whiskey – in dire need.
Bohon, I never knew you.
Maybe I’ll meet you
Over on that golden shore.
There is a church in Daviess County (and one in Frankfort, too)
Where we sacrificed our Sunday mornings to stand stock-still singing Psalms.
I guess God listened.
I went to a yoga class today
It is different from doing yoga at home
because I can lose my balance
and not be embarrased in front of other people
except I wasn’t embarrased.
Doing yoga with other people is
kind of cool because everyone
is kind of in their own zone
breathing, balancing, moving their
own bodies in a controlled manner.
Yoga is very relaxing and I can tell
that my body is getting stronger
and my balance is improving
and my range of motion has greatly improved
but, the more I learn, the more there is to learn.
I would like to say I am going back soon,
but life happens and I get busy, but I
do want to go again. But until then,
I will do yoga at home, where I can fall time
and time again, and no one will know.
I.
The shades go down on a town
so wistful & blue, as to
encircle & encircle
upon new circle.
The horses’ bleats & neighs
echo upon deaf ears
like dew on cellophane.
II.
Quarter ‘til seven
& the sunlight spills
among crevices
of buildings, of leaves,
of the people / steady as sorghum.
Surely there aren’t two of me—
one living the life I refused—or did I
kill her, nearly 40 years ago?—the other
(that’s me) keeping record of the dreams
she’s interrupted, the times her laugh
has my traded lips with my own, and
the words—how many turgid thoughts?
—that must be leaking from her head
into mine. Truly she isn’t
turning off the light and, lying still,
pretending no one’s there to hear her
whispers to herself—which one?—
to read the blood smeared behind her face
in confession.
Where do you hail from
Afraid of my power,
I wait for the moment I
destroy everything
Fear of my power
is second only to my
dread of certain death
the
inevitability
of
the
exact moment of my doom
torments
me
</3
among vinegar tasters’ ticklish feelers
scratching at sides of
coquettishly
echoing
vats,
besmirched with illegible lees,
like fruit flies flounce about hobbling knees
for an burbling port of entry,
a glowing egress,
some ulcerous suture stressing
a tongue upturned in bewildered bdelygmia,
crankworked words incensed
by some sovereign’s suffering
muses glumly suffused like
golden kernels,
bluish doubloons of a blossoming eucharist,
misty-eyed nome de plumes
begrudgingly smudged into griseous
dishwater,
treacly tang of char and pine tar,
hazed and graven greige
of ablated erasers,
of some plump painter’s gums
who lapped at the back of a nacreous landscape,
suckling oily orts from discoloring corners,
saturnist, thinned amid watery borders,
smoke bled luridly bittersweet
orange and stoked about jaunty stocks
obscured,
like milky sap,
the body but hard tack,
verdigrised lacewings honeycombed
over the broken band
of a moldering donut,
a wriggling iris set in an
interference blue, in a prattling aspic,
cataracts buff as a blistering snakeskin
curled into smirking nigredo again and again and a gain and
there,
where misery festers less than
grapes immured in a mordant must,
a fussily bustling tussock of knock kneed stars
distrusted, crowding the puckering scowl of this
cracked concoction, scrunched in the buttery tack,
like sniggering nymphs impinged in a blistering back,
of Death bid, everlasting, galloping crack
as the hackneyed, clockwork Turk, who’s
attuned to, among those myriad movements,
dandle his horse across every space but once,
and leave no spaces spared:
the arc of an orrery, maybe
a speak-and-say counting or
incantating the manifold shapes of a soul,
the unsoundable husks foretold to be
more than merely muttering dust,
the mechanical hand of Death enslaved, betrayed
by a hiccuping huckster locked in a
clockwork curio cabinet—
what was his name, who
spoke of those things that Heidler stole
before he had stolen them, German,
bawdy mustache, harped about
demons urging a ewe to lurch over (aloft of the)
stiles ad nauseam, dawdling, damned;
who Kubrick’d sketched as a beaming baby,
a light bulb lost in the froth of space
and desperately seeking a socket—
He’d never lived here. Once,
he’d visited, briskly, took of the Indigo
Village’s warbling corn and clover
something akin to an Eden, even
though, as we speak, the merciless
horsemen streaking unspeakably bareback over
the paddocks impinged and pinned
with weather-sealed strip malls picked from the
codfish ball, are sprinkling
lamed and diminishing germs and grain
with the thoughtless dross and illegible dandruff flicked
from a thankless, rank, and eternally
turbid flame they’d nicked from the home-goods section
ripped from the flickering guts of a sunken targ—
kudzu cuddles the brows of a proud estate
as dermestids tickle a slate, a plate
of some busted skull thrust under
a rug of aggrieved and crapulent clover,
and why my cat keeps bringing me snakes and
why I‘ve related so deeply with gnats and dragonflies
buffing their eyes against scuffed and impervious glass and
salad and breadsticks, everlasting!
bottomless pancake breakfasts here at
weed for days and days and
how should I make it a thing of the past and
how should I go about sniffing the glue from scrapbook and
There is a butterfly
outside the barn,
lying in the gravel.
Biff, our barn cat,
is batting at its wings.
His claws aren’t out,
his face calm,
his touch light.
When I shoo him away,
I see that it’s a swallow
tail, it’s legs all bent
and twitching.
Last summer, at a spring,
I saw a swarm and
spent all day watching.
Now, I touch his antenna
gently with my forefinger.
He retracts in tight,
afraid of the unknown.
I squat, knees up under
my arms, hugging them.
He has big eyes, only one
of which can watch me.
I breathe out, slowly,
and squish him
under my thumb.
I carry him over
to the flower bed
and plant him
beneath the weeds.
