shrill tooth-impacting
scrape of stone on stone,
the throat-soft screech of a Taylor &
Ng mug clipping the milk tooth step
of the
stoop—I recall
how I cried once,
pinching the velveteen
ken’s folds, olios swollen,
to scenes of the dandruff
stars pinned marking when
men first witnessed frenzied
flame
contained in the ticklish,
whispering brush—I recall
how the frog on the Taylor
& Ng mug calmly recoils
in thoughts upon Cyber-
netics that Eno (who-
‘s just one backwards)
frankly explains before
killing a fly how a frog’s eye’s always
open, the more so when stalking
it stares unflinchingly into the field un-
til—and Eno just looks at his
dahlia’d, chalk-soft hand, here, muttering
look at your hand; if you look
at it long enough, one sees simply
nothing, and thereby becomes at-
tuned to the fly-small flit of a
fly flying over the field then . So,
this softening,
shrill and incensing stutter of
stone struck over stone, again
and again as eternity wheeling its
giggling, gonging, and throttling
snits and fits of
mummer’s parading pan-
jandrums, blithe
as the dust chipped clean
from the stammering
step or the
milk teeth
lost among
whirlbone hands of but
drunken uncle legerdemain and
tussles of tarot or faro with
finicky faeries, buffing your
wick-brittle skull or the clod-
cold plot of your breastbone
into some buckling huckle or
brass-wound bier bent eying
eternity’s tender tang—like
light curled up in
old Boehme’s pewter, summoning
what shrill spark sustained by the
coy winter sun wove weftward, wavering,
floundering, flittering, buzzing in how many
soles scratched over stuttering sidewalks, how many
small black stalks squeezed squealing up
toothless cracks in the brooding macadam, in
how many fireflies shyly snapped
from the rain-rapped roots
or portentous lamp posts, trying
to stir up what stars seduce from the
darkness, all of our stars wound up in the
fleeting and wheedling grate of stone on stone,
like toothaches born of the bankrupt graveyard
working the earth into colorless cud or gnashing
the mud to a staggering sacrament children are
queerly afeard of still, still slipping their soles in
just to compel something chilling or pulse-stented
chicken skin stammering into the infinite, stam-
mer and stagger away like the sky breaks, daily
