The straw-hollow coleus bones shot

through with thistles, the nacreous
tangram fronds once tickled 
or splintered to dirt now swollen 
in one small pink fuzzy flower found
clung above prickling fins of an olm
or a dragon—the hourglass seems 
just sand encased in sand like
lake water worn to a glaze
or the glazed impression of
some supple girl come 
morning bent scorning
her glorying womanhood, hunchbacked,
acned, cracked, here half-              erased—
 
and yet what wisdom is traced in it, what
ruffled rubbing of how many 
bone char impressions of
gods burst into but dust
or a farrow of fire-
flies thrust up over the
gurgling stomachs and
buckling hummocks of
inchoate tors tucked under
these teeming strip mall medians—
milk swoln up into frogspawn bubbles
a toddler, bored or at one with the world, just
tsentsaked into the roar of a patchwork apocalypse,
churning a world out of argus-eyed honeycomb,
cells or cels or cellars or maybe celestial
civilizations cramped in the gurgling
glass that you’re asking her only 
to treat as a vessel one simply 
suckles, discreetly emptying 
only, don’t blow bubbles, 
my dear—for fear of 
what smug repercussions—
what courtly decorum, what
tasteless spezzatura trying to
tie its shoes as well as a child might
echo Jesus, Romulus, Remus, or any
one anyone’s ever declared a euhemerist
God or a lollygagging genius, tickling
gold out of bubbling brain farts—