Doll Country
In doll country
we are building a miniature
replica of our home,
a nutshell study
of rooms and hallways
forensically scaled
and measured.
There is hot and cold water
and a garage with cars
with running motors.
The locks on the doors
and windows work
with the mimed precision
of a Black Forest cuckoo clock,
its bird call and woodland scene
of hares and deer like the summer diorama
we watch from our backyard patio,
the moon as small as a penknife
in a polymer sky.
In the miniature replica
of our home
in doll country,
tiny felt tiebacks hold open
a repository stage-set with unburials—
like hunger stones revealed
in a drought ravaged river,
they tell us to weep.
Our visitors are entertained
and delighted
by our small sufferings.
And to think
that the parch marks
suggest something more—
a nesting doll
persisting, outliving us
and returning with the dark force
of sleeping giants.
Frogspawn
The hunted prince
is born from a necklace of eggs
fastened in the hollow
of the pond’s blue throat.
She collars the secrets
of transformation
and spits tail and gill
from her ephemeral mouth.
He rises, crowns the water like a nautilus;
the ooze of earth lungs
and the double-hull drag force
like blood thickening in a tunnel.
.
Crickets scrape and file their wing-bows.
The wart men lunge at the pond’s soft throat,
coursing a quarry long disappeared—
change fixed like a periscope to the polestar.
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