What she saw from across the kitchen sink,
             cold porcelain scabbed with the
             barnacled bowls and forks
of some seventeen princely portions,
soles contorted to echo a precipice
pinched beneath pillars of prickling flesh—

a coppery gleam across canted cupboards,
    the sun buffed orange by a nylon lantern,
      spluttering
                         some frail glim
                        from the bowels
                         of a
                                   solar cell,
       scratched, malnourished,
       steeped in a sallow and powdery grease;
         immured in that famously faithless look
                                 of a lead-addled Cassius
         nuzzled through clumsily yellowing gesso
         adorning dentures clenched to the
                     door of a cringing cupboard; some

  waxworks jack-o’-lantern drawn
  by a bastard son,
  discussed in these chiseling whispers—Milne

assessing a sap-licked sapling stressed
to the bristling neck of a snickering mantrap*;

glib as the gilt and acicular sunset summoned
          to garishly pressure a page break, blank
                                             as but paint interred
          in this queasy aluminum

          stocking, starlight, saccharine, oenomel,
          endless, tracing each crepitant
crease, each scar, still shepherding
         erstwhile nerves and veins in a staggering atlas,
                         piebald seeds arranged around glaring sills
                   like freckles of ocherous grease congealed,
                               like spittle of sizzling loins,
                                                 like clarified fat,
                                              like billowing dreams refined,
                     lithe smirk of her brother reprising the tin man,
                     pilled and reckless flesh of a limelight, stars
                 resigned to attire a spryly
                 wizening dollop of clotted cream, the
                   curdling world, bespoke and unbroken as
                               day break—

hyacinths shorn from a stringent shaft,
though dappling impish bruises over the
vines and spines of a tacit path
across wastelands, runny with gorse and sedge;

no door denying the sun to young Jakob’s pewter,
                                    clipped by a blistered sledge—

her mother made Elmer Gantry blush
with the way she spoke about locusts
        and thorn brush; and
she recalled how a man o’ war’d scarred her shin
once,
           oatmeal baths, and a festering jellyfish
snared in the bitterly shapeless sand,
recalling a screeching cyclops scraping up scurrilous surf

for a contact lens.

          
*Think of
  carl andre
  winnowing shims and doorstops
  fresh from a trash barge;
 
  imagine
  a jiggly patty of Cottleston pie
  impressed upon stalin’s death mask.