an iron-on lemniscate 

clung like a mumbling bur
on a lazy eight farms shirt; Clay
borne, older than dirt, from a scar
in the concrete, shouldering 
Townes van Zandt like a parakeet
puppet, set summoning soul-spun
marrow from maundering steel,
                          with a foot still 
left to or stuck in the nettling
sediment, ants pinned into a
needling shin-bone, brays
like the glory of Assateague
nuzzling stones to a skiffle of
I’m so lonesome; England
whets with a staghorn fern
some mother of millions into a
twisted baton, he teases the air with 
what buffed measure of throat song drawn     
through a lavender sprig on the cheek 
of a peaky nopale some panting pug, resigned 
to a poppyseed-black-velvet-conibear
waistcoat, took for a lamb’s ear
portioning plots to the carnival
songsters, spreading webbed feet beneath
turtleshell tarps and the porcelain tent posts
bent into rickety bones of a
violently pyrited whale shark beached
at the edge of eternity, tickled to honeycombed 
snickering; everyone handing in alderwood chips and
dander pinched from their lint-littered rabbit’s feet,
grown too green and gold and grey and grape, and
trading old Hickory foil-tacked trading cards
over and under the tables for, not just artisan jelly
rolls clumped in the shape of a heart or
a garden-grown tarragon mushroom and rhubarb tart
or the shrunken heads of those fuschia radicchio
greensmen slain by the sons of old Christy Mahon who,
though all of our legends forever should skirt it, 
                        can still be found 
out gouging his yard for a tap root shunting
some more fucking tussocks of honey suckle, no, 
not strictly for beef steak tomatoes or chili 
ensnared in a thumbprint porcelain bowl,
nor sterling herbs unaided by doleful coal
or the shallots massaged from a cave lake’s shoals, no,
just for some slithering germ of the nourishing
 
soul that the Piggly-Wiggly’s yet to afford us, and nothing 
you’d sift from a virulent Foodland’s baffling ballasts
and callusing white noise.