this sterling antenna entwined with a dangling limb,
gruff scratch of a car crash,                                rapt
           with a gnashing yowl,
this
         sour wassailing lascivious cats distend
across scuffled macadam and stuttering
street lamps strewn through the hedgerows
                               silvery peels of expended smelt
and a glowering
                               vision of Christ displaced
amidst scowling
                               gates dissembling rusting antlers—
whereby a
                                                        toddler hums
with a dimpled discretion
those first few bars of Dmitri’s Babi Yar,
                                          and the juniper shrub
                                  that a barrister’d twisted,
       tickling verdigrised teeth of a stunted fence,
recalls its morning’s
                                              surly stirrup of starlings
stringing their songs along groggily sprawling sycamores,

moths among bristling pin oaks,
the sky scrubbed red as a raucous knee

(attempting
             to trace
                  the shape of some semblance of
awe,
         that’s colored this way or
  no—
         transcribing from groaning
         bones of a vibraphone
         something akin to a feeling tone filliped
         by this or that,
              a coloratura of cramp bark berries,
              those stammering gods amongst fence slats,
                                                                               rippling,
                                                                  riffling,
                          pulse of a dulcet bell—
       black eye like a bulging knot hole bunging,
percussing, say, shuffling shifting sands,
this lustrous seam amid buckling concrete,
simpering veins of a hand outstretched about
restive ebony shucked from a stock or those
thwarted horns refined to these twiddling keys
that virginal feelers,
                                    small as a glistening vole
                          or swoln to a possum’s paunch
       caught cracked across staticky roadsides, evermore
grope for).