a frantic species
she walks so slowly you can see the wicker becoming a basket
and then she bends over to pick up a penny but, it’s simply to
reshuffle flesh; to pull gravity from the sky and throw it down.
the night is a vibration full of calm and the candle remains
solid though you breathe on it in spasms.
she wants you so badly you can hear it in her crackling hair.
her brain is full of gargling sounds and her hands offer you a cup
of smiles: a bowl of tadpoles pulling each other like lashes closing an eye.
she waits for you where elephants shake their heads at memories of
mastodons;
where letters form words at the edge of a silence spongier than language.
and you lift her dress because her pockets are empty as a waterfall
and she begs you not to weigh her down.
water in the sahel
in the vernacular
of hegemony there
are mountains
spanked to white dwarfs;
cutlasses dulled
to
butter and
the button
that sealed
my
lips was a toothless curse.
i made a
promise to forestall
witlessness, to
ingratiate a species
not
convinced
of
extinction. it was
thought that a consequence
of
stupidity was to winnow blood
pressure
so a
heart had no reason and
laid flat.
but i can’t ship darkness
to you with
its
heavy
feet;
in air, it is simply
a hindenburg that
refuses to burn.
and all day long,
the consolation of a slow heaven
sails out to a sea looking
for
handouts freer than horse-
weight on the
old plains. consciousness
is
what
i promise you; where confection
finds a suitcase
to spill alcohol;
where tiny legs
of crickets
are so quiet
in their truth.
at the door, listening
and sun comes in
sprinkling its lungs in river fire;
crusts baked
in wallpaper, screamed in disease.
and i wait for you, myriad in what
i want to
say: cascades thrown as if they weren’t
waterfalls.
one impenetrable rock formation; one
army of silhouettes yawning without
fatigue or outlines.
and i’m still a disembodied ear
at a gravesite
sniffing cut roses
through rain.
circled by wind, an alp
is a small hill.
a movement is an orchestral
arrangement. a dry riverbed
scraped by
a harsh word or two is really
a thready cloud offering
its wrinkled skin. and i can still wait
for
you as a redwood
finding the first foot
of morning in a desert wiping
sweat from its face. even if a
crocodile is hungry as a blizzard it
can never take down a wildebeest in penny lane.
anna waits
it was the end of an hour.
untimed. echoes
of no particular
ethnicity
running out of caves speaking promises,
articulating gestures
they had never bothered with
before.
it was emptiness and capacity;
bone and water.
if you’d seen the day of the triffids
it was blacker and whiter
and less real than the plants. there were cowbells
without mooing; milk without cows. and
chandeliers of broken cobwebs
tinkling out of tune.
i wanted to talk to you
even though listening
was archaic in that fog,
and
flames
crumbled in a watered hiss. you
wouldn’t
have
appreciated my voice anyway,
as long as it dragged in the air
and no one laid down a carpet
for a
picnic. trees popped open
like baskets dropped
from
threes storeys. there wasn’t
a smell
or a pastry for the wind to linger on.
no xylem and phloem to
carry
water, and i still wanted to talk
to you. i still thought
butterflies were free.
“a-han-a…. i want you
know now…….” that
sundays will never come
home. they won’t have to
as long as days have names
and the sky threatens us
with sagging eyes.
“go with him.”
the sun will only make a desert
of you and when
sand flies, the flames
are deafening.
“girl before you go now……..”
passing motion detectors
to enter a beanfield, measuring
acreage
with lipstick –
a ship’s galley
spills
more love than beans.
a minister argues
more
catholicism
than the lightbulb
above
his head. “just one more thing, girl……”
ireland
has its sword of light
wrenched from a bog; fairy tales
falling not too
far away.
one man
pulled in a donkey cart,
hands chained
behind
his
back.
don’t listen to me. “go
with him.”
they’ll tell you
the fanfare of midnight is a
sound squeezed
from the sky
where streets
are wide and no one screams.
they’ll tell you cranes
lift
nothing without a loss of gravity.
cranes won’t even fly.
and if i listened with every sensory
organ
i might hear deserts pleading
to the sun. they’ll tell
you
that
dusk
baking into dark is just
a memory
struck with
cement, or
a shovel turning over soil. but i know
my heart makes more noise than
all the
picture windows on the horizon
and each bullfrog adds a dollop to the thunder.
they’ll tell you persons
named smith
can’t explain
night and day
and a seal’s bark is more precious than both.
so when you see
a bush bleeding leaves in
summer,
you would have to think disease. you
would
have to breathe without purpose
to feel
the weight of your lungs and
swear to only pick
ripe fruit.
they’ll tell you, you can’t
really sleep on a beach
with all that sun and crabs
that move like moles
under your back.
those umbrellas are really so many
mushrooms. ever hear
of the death cap?
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