Man and Wife, and Man


Damn this month.
Damn staring at the clocks.

And the clocks.


Man and Wife, and Man


Sycophants.


Egrets. Tall birds
and legal—shot to shit.


We touch the marble. The marble.
We touch the marble, screw the tricolored
chandelier bulbs.


This island scene
requires a plum, a yoke
thrown down to squash the plum,
a burning neck to pattern the grass.
We touch the grass.


Congruent. The erotics of dwindling space, i.e.
when the boundaries we have marked
ourselves against
decrease, and a hardening
presses forth from crossed wood: only
at death


and over our dead body, but never
to be crossed while alive, and certainly never
while eating.


Man and Wife, and Man


A pageant
with a memorial

mounting
the half-active—

petrels
in the ears,
the pitter devastation.

Only tendons
found in the top-dressing.

Meeting an animal
cut on its way, multichambered
stomach growling.

The nation readies butchery
stalls of elk crack,
brushfires
we set anyway.

A pause in the pond, a life
taken
though a glut remains.

What apparitions
might say
about all this waste,

this decay…


Man and Wife, and Man


A cascade
bends the body
with index

in the neighbor’s patch
slinging
manure.

Huntress, glad
to talk pearly
in the mud room.

The season—writ
in calculations—fails
through the night

personable odes
to organs.

The piano is open
though nobody plays.

A diorama
falls to the floor
whilst you grow

refusing
your ordure and strudel.


Man and Wife, and Man


Your orange and blue scarf
frozen in the night
knocks against a cupboard.


Bound sympathies
of lonely, elderly women
insisting the rabbits
be put back in the barn.


An overarching bough with a file of fruits
across a bed of easter grass.


Make a soiled topknot for him, a kittenish bun for her
and stickiness for all.


I’m changing, he says,
you know it. She blushes
and rolls to the old hollow lane.
He chases in shame. Puckered and prim
her mouth narrates him.


Neither watcher nor teller nor singer nor writer
wishing the exposition
into a spoken bow, emanating
from perfected breath


A thick curtain
slowly parts—the folds
rub flint and salem salt
the oft-demented crowd, their hands.


Man and Wife, and Man


Cutting
the light amassed
dead in the thriving
path

Remember with humor
those stuttering

Remember
them dovered
star-swathing