(a choir of trees decrying
old Christopher Farraday’s nettling
                          choice to exhume a
stump—
              some stump speech spat amongst sappy scree,
defending the West Texas desert from formally
fanning fungus, seamless successions of
quilt squares
                         pitched by a brambling firebrand
tickling stitches—

box homes scrunched like lichens
stretching the scowl of a scalped and yowling stump
to yawn as those thrawn escarpments
punched, Twin Falls contorted
to eighteen greening holes;

the colorado plateau imploding,
breath of Moran and Muir unbunged
                                         and munged
to the clip of an oil slick
burbling, pearly, purled, unpinned,

           some Cuyahoga craps boat
               bilging the Lethe clean

as a bison, speaking
in tongues,
                     slumped humming a rung of the boneless can-can,
quicker than any old man in the mountain
thrusts his tongue through a bloated and frozen beer can—

try saying, Nothing is true, with a tongue bent
           over and under a hundred sundry steps
                                                     to lap at a sunset spent 
        against cringing brick and exhausted sandstone)