Appraising every hour stolen 
crafting elaborately fictional law firms:

Goeing, Goeing, & Gonne: A Divorcee’s Bestest Smith & Wesson Hessian,
ultimately stolen, a thread or two too erudite maybe;

I fell for Loren Eisley among my formative years,
or more, my acceptable formative years;
To think, I was born in this godless archness,
crying, “Less romantic, less!” at mincing kits of a gamboling vixen;
that I’d averred, in a sisterly eulogy,  how
those soft parts of my brother’s
charred and war-torn thighs
my mother’d shrieked at seeing, how
she’d demanded to see it, to blunt and bury
the crippling question,
Had he’d simply gone into hiding?
compared his soft apertures
to Vonnegut’s measure of virile whales;
that’d I’d avoided seeing Fiddler
for fear of the music—

farce upon farce, we mackle and matte;
I haven’t a clue how to tickle a cat—

My Eiseley chest-compressed a soul into scientific mindsets.
He’d gingerly grabbed my pointed lobe
and sang me, in some mysterious melody
hitherto understood as kismet,
bluntly into Bill Butler’s bony corset,
painted rags of ogham-riddled wool,
and menageries mashed and boiled
down to darkly illegible Dippel’s oil. 
His towers, so as Satan hurled 
to form Purgatorio’s parlous bluffs,
wound bricks split bones of cryptids 
settled in, shellacking and stacking
my own inverted tower, entitled,
no clearer than Thor Ballylee,
an oubliette lucidly gargling birdsong.

Bill Butler stages his cryptic verse
with characters on occasion:
Michael Robartes and his boswelly Aherne,
harlequins, Huddon, Duddon, and Daniel O’Leary,
Cracked Mary baked by a broken crescent
to fill out Crazy Jane and Jack (or Tom,
depending on who you’re asking),
Burke, Goldsmith, Swift, and the
Bishop of Cloyne—
Paternity Suits Just a Pain in the Groin? Call
Goldsmith, Swift, and the Bishop of Cloyne;
his cavalcade of bedraggled menageries,
maybe less frailty’s tenuous creatures
than tensile Kumadori fleshing
feathers sloughed from glorious, guiltlessly far-flung fowl.

Yet enough of my masters’ mirrors now, 
such monstrous portents gnashing
nimble names and lineaments stubbornly  
motherly whispers once had
framed her formless, gormless, limitless limbs with—

Though here’s my jacquarded panoply
preening, bells and feathers fanning
frenzied, rumbling gusts an engine veils
in steel, frail Kumadori children
smear and blear through impish features,
lost among a young mother’s lipsticks:

TOO like an old Orphan Marm
of marmalade thews and taffy tendons,
soap-flake governess groomed of crinkling goldfinch bones
and candied vinegar, must of a possum
wasps must scour tarry tracts of molting macadam,
comb but bayed and brittle paddocks horses fled
for fear of grim Elmer’s pogroms, 
scrape sharp, shoaling cheeks of fey
impaled in unplumbably stygian slumber,
restively ripping at flaxen fur for,
woebegone possum’s deafly slumbrous furrows
(dead unto its mind, so say dead still)
reminiscent of slouching chapel steps
to which some craven mother casts her cradle—

I haven’t remebered a dream in awhile. 
I dream still though, I know. 
I’ll wake with a shooter’s sweetly astringent tail
uncurling my tongue in sluggish coils,
drooping dryly, sticky snakeskin tracing esophagal shadows. 
I dream still, though, in the cogent world,
where plaids align and surds alight
in fricative hisses and hallowed howdy’s;
where wet bricks abide each other’s weight
and shape, while waifs procure square, garish tickets;
munks among my slipshod terrace, 
or more this terrace mowers loaned,
recount among holes and tunnels,
stows and catacombs golden, iconic gambols;
gleaning toughening manna, 
mocking jays abortifacient tactics,
recalling the inchoate crunch upon which
tiny teeth were cut and tongues were scraped
some swift sensations prior—

Prior, our steadfast star, arched cats and jackals
urged ripraping rills to
trail and chart
THAT haughty spark
and FULL reports
come dawn and
DUSK; rolled up the impressionable, indigo’d cheesecloth tatters
           tireless days unfurl, 
                                   illumine,
                                   and annotate;

Prior this pallid starkness noon redounds               upended skin
                                                                               upon
                                                                                            in certainty’s
                                                                                                 mackling,
                                                                                                 rocking,
                                                                                                 coldy
                                                                                                 ink-strewn touches and
touch-ups, revising
pyroclastic croons that blenching cardinals bay and brave,
what Pharoah coaxing tawse’s tang,
                                                                   taut, leather nerves embrangling backs
                                                                   to arch and crack as the sun sashays—

stiff, clavicle-colored collars starched—

dark arsenic parching Pharoah’s face—

sharp, metal staples dogs endure to curb their culled and conjured races.

See Minerva budding marbled, white
and black, from Jove’s grave scowl!
A sun-struck melanoma drumming up
dryads’ bones and druids’ scalps, to
grind and pack dumbed dunnage
blithely, smearing meal to mortar
a marbled temple, Urizen’s shuddering lighthouse,
souls unwound in granite’s grout,
now, damned to straighten canted, tyrian tiles— for all of eternity!

plump shards frail plumbing divers plucked
among a darkly sap-sweet cultch’s corners—

sheets immane observers shucked
to pin down nature’s godless orders—  Leeuwenhoek’s gracious glance at glass
                                                                       ‘long hallowed dew whole worlds were born of—
Grok what a moss piglet senses in swill,
                                                                         hears Kilgore’s garrulous yeast’s ripostes
                                                                         sees bored repasting glasses fill
                                                                         knows idle chatter yeasts will kill

(.) vast worlds of dew one breath might burst
     and so wry whispers work the earth
     and so, as chatter sets a stage,
     soft chatter cribs and carves an age, 
                                                                        soft chatter sieved from silent stars,
                                                                        sweet tallow caking shadows bared,
                                                                        though Johnson drubbed that arrant rock
                                                                        and Boswell crowned it something rare;
this sulky, stilted verse assuages
slumber among our farraginous ages

Lo! Athena budding marbled, light
and dark from Zeus’ brow—                     I dream still, though, in Macadam Twp. 
                                                                       
                                                                         Galvin bought into Johnson’s compact,
                                                                         or maybe the more so was born of it:

Berkeley,
nay, the man,
George Berkeley, he’d given a kind of lecture,
praying that all of it, evermore, born of the mind—

                                                                          Johnson glared in that savage contempt
                                                                          we’d later wirte-off as Tourette’s— 
                                                                          In burning holes up Arklow’s streets,
                                                                          Chrysomallos wool in tow 
                                                                          like piss-tinged tissue
                                                                          staked on a stubborn heel, he
                                                                          spotted a callus clod and
                                                                          called at Boswell, closer-                                                                                                                            clung than piss-tinged tissue,
                                                                     as he craned 
                                                               his muddied sole above a
                                          shockingly thoughtless rock, and cried, 
                                     in savage contempt years later
                  suggested to be, perchance, a coy case of Tourette’s—
              “I refute it
     thus!” 
And with that, quick as they come, 
the man who both named
and shamed, arraigned John Dunne 
on a matter of irregular mode and meter,
bore himself a hearty brood!
(while Boswell watched and tickled with quills)
who chose to believe, as Dad had done, 
in muddied soles and frank appeals
to callus clods. 

Those parties Berkeley’s echoes shaped,
strange melodies leased from Shamanic Tsentsak,
dream, still, there, on Macadam Rock. 

They stare among the wild dogs 
and guess of what they dream of: 

perchance, some shaky collusions with cats to catch rabbits:

I saw the terrier 
my neighbor feeds and frees
out to her yard, his
ebonied haunches biscuit-jointed thorugh
long, hulking ivoried forepaws;
he sucked up supple tines of grass
among where tawny bunnies dined
come ambered veils of night enshrouding
forests fawns forget and flee from. 

Galvin’s brood, too, stirs at stars
with satellites runnied and ripping rockets.

Tines of grass cast azure shadows,
starkly resembling howling rabbits. 

Now,                                                                                     though
should I smoothe                                                                              ensnared
as Ezra had                                                                                         in
his station round                                                                               a
a gorgeous bough,                                                                             fasces                                          
compelled by an-                                                                               some  
other’s impervio-                                                                               time 
             us vision:                                                                                later 

I’d have said,
tearing up as though
to settle a tremulous sneeze—

Forever, this sun among stars aswirl,
a dog upends and turns the world.