"A Droplight."
"It's coffee grounds in the coffee, somebody unfilling
of sleep and nerves.
I like your pajamas and the way you go into the water with them
on and on out.
Ship steam is cold, the berries and the pie on the sill
are hot, and I can't keep apologizing without knowing
what exactly for.
Hugged under my ribs, ticking as a cursed hoof.
Ocean redeeming its birds night long.
The sluggish crosshatched dusk, sea roiling,
prow coppering dusk.
Ice foiling and under grassy dusk,
pissing off the bow into the salty lake
foam from a wooden pallet with mice in the engine and maggots
at the cornmeal.
Wanting the shoals to phosphoresce so bad,
my spine turns to rope.
Memory does its little valve work.
Pick up truck from the thorn brake,
Hidden Ivy, corpulent reeds.
A message dropped at the Saints beer saying,
'We're not sorry it had to be exacted this way.'
From aluminum sky into mere photographs,
where one's just dragged off out of their house, and then
this tiny town gets its quiet going again.
First, dust scritch before a diamond needle tricks
into the groove.
Goodbye pigeons in the loop.
What you can't hear, that's what's watching you.
It's a bad history full of a long lesson,
so you bring it aboard no matter your former colony
fables, your destinations.
Trade us out under the freezing viaducts,
ambulances drifting around like gurneys, dogs in the street,
and one ghost just standing there like a stork,
won't flick down her cigarette.
Twilight, your coiled up moon came in
with the mail condensation on the white windows, thunder
in clipping cold strings.
I'm sorry, I want a sloe plum, and an armada
to march invisibly without clematis, or sprawl,
or a stone bucket.
A little bucket for foxed milk.
Here, it says, 'Come here'.
A radial drop light lowered from clouds,
its silvery skin gets its light on us.
So we said to the wind, we said, 'Derision
spilled a squished current into what misremembers us
as superfluous chatter with coins heavy over the eyes.
Knowing, I keep asking the dead the wrong set of questions.'
Was bees in the hold, a lake of bees, at graveyard fence rose.
More bees and it's a storm, a slow wall
of bees listening to us, write us down under gimmicky lights.
Another code fathoms forth, and its messenger at the river
cored like an apple.
I guide them to a wind, which summons
the forest from a man named Ashley and a boy
he called Small.
By lamp match to hydrangeas, a fold for disappeared ones,
as this ink marks a 6 on the back of your hands
it smudges your chin in the rain.
And what they've said breaks into bats,
which collects in hollows, it ungums out into the wake.
So it goes record sleeves, flooded factions,
ocean cutters, and news factories,
giving constables back to the loam.
Just when she tied her hair up with a pencil, who she was with
fell through the floor as the candle sputtered and went out
with what armors the birds.
Now the hushed get even quieter, and its attendant coughs
so hard, the elevator vanishes, botched
trade winds drop an insignia to know which spot's ours.
The wind's not gone, it's just gone inside for a while.
As inspectors chalk out what they
claim to forge into your familiars,
the saint's pocket watch with the baby snake for hands,
his music switches up with a whipping.
Aspirin on coils and soda water, as a child rose out
into the marsh fast as egrets.
They dispersed powdery lime into cracks in the earth,
and ants form their own weapon.
What we request won't let us the way in.
A crumbling blockade to cast off the lantern,
and chart your way into bull rush and sedge.
Our messenger with a dime to mark her egress,
owned up with matches, now clobbering horizon stars, water
as it cuts through black tea, the train
steadies green weather against it.
Darkness, not as deep as it looks in the photographs,
shore breakers fog up the reedy fens,
how to calm the blood down without undressing
before the saint among the stragglers' beds.
Mute lords with brandy thus toppled,
using the steam as a fixative, and the winding sheet
as a flag, using the butcher for an alibi.
To disappear, you must tunnel discreet, descrying over
nightfall with unclogged wind.
This coast is longer than a train track
needing coarse woolen cloth and the clothes you're in.
So needing a bad song to whistle what's known, but may
stick to another's mouth.
Listening to our risked blood as if it were birds in there.
We follow each other's eyes without turning around,
had known sentinels by the color of their horrible hands,
and new mail carriers from their teeth
clicks so mistook the curtains for a way through.
We fastened keys to our heels, quick oars, a slow lighthouse
light.
Twine, better than dogs.
Dogs, better than accomplices.
Rickety carousel and cement truck shadows
from lost books, phantom noise.
Clouds sent to water coins for coffee or pie, a corridor
and its smock of "don't come all the way in here."
A little star of salt inside the mouth.
If images are what history decays into,
we bring our enemies home.
A brief history of rain collects what the eye brings down,
what animals sleep under buzz snap,
buzzing in the vacancy sign at the horseshoe-shaped Meadow's
Bog, a bed as a rampart.
No more unburied travelers cutting down
night with their shoes, and socks, and stockings,
and noise.
Stockyard and upholsterer's moon.
A button to button up lightning stuck in the pond,
to throw a bit of dark all over us.
And you know where to find me, here
in the signature made small, spilled into shadow.
So then the moon, drifting way too close,
gets leaky, going through tree line when a voice in the radio
accidentally says your own name.
Lying might ferry us through several parts
of the month, a little blood on the underside of the toilet
seat.
This kitchen window is saying something.
So we should learn to listen with the palms of our hands.
Fish, pulled into the drinking water,
sucked into our sinks, a glass of lake.
And I talk too long on the message machine.
I forgot what I really wanted to say, that Max Roach is dead.
Goodbye, Max Roach.
Go softly into the ground or into the grassy airs.
Now a dog is stranded on a raft in flood muck true,
its littermates long dead, true.
Swallows gather up in the air again
like a bushel to pull the cartoon curtains shut--
true.
Nothing against us, standing out here, waiting with Declan
and cigarettes for any bus.
Crooked city, we're sleeping more here, less where
the librarian is so lovely.
I start tripping and coughing.
And the old sea goes frothing forth,
an opening in the floor of the room.
No school in the floods, floods in the school.
You know this game, do you?
Now the moon gets up out of the blankets
and stars and starts its shopping cart wobble,
mistaking us for fields.
We're just dogs at the downy feathers,
an icy, stuttering, soon to be offal,
train yard, sleeping cars, sleeping, bickering in the bags
and bagged.
Left the machines out and on, and hidden beneath mailboxes.
Truants do their listening through the pads of their feet.
Water in them is their own set of messages.
Radio waves-- like radio waves but chalkier, already inside us
now.
Fat dinosaur plants surround the wolves on a raft of lilacs.
Unfreezing mud gathers on slender meadow boards.
Horseflies do their weaving and trees list
above thieves in the clearing, enlisting radios as phones,
as nets.
So it works us.
But it works us lung-like.
Now voices gob up the line.
His red jacket, pulled from swamps,
saying flowers bunch together.
Tiny leaves get the tremolo.
I wake in rushes and hollow out the bog with my phone
as apartments, as compartments in the moon flicker on.
A thimble note tied to a leaf falls before us
and reads, triptych missing.
In our year of the Lord's sleep-deprived ambler,
these skinny beds of the wandered away.
And the knife we thought carried the virus carried the virus.
Hiding in the dumbwaiter for 10 minutes or a week,
raccoons sniff out a hiss as bivouac winds give us
their names.
They hobble a coffin over the pigeony, cardboarded overmuch.
They hobble, a shoe pulled clean away.
I like how you hop-hop.
And the pallbearers are doing what's to be done,
but carefully so.
Three men, already four pitchers deep, one with a shovel,
rests it on the casket and won't recommence the digging
till the dead start to put their clothing back on.
Take their sketches to a pawn on division.
It's here the yellow eyes of the so-called dead turn on like bus
engines.
And we have a little bourbon.
We have a little more bourbon.
Now water, and back, and a tarantella
comes apart around us.
And somebody gets up to dance with another body
you don't know.
Slowing down now, and another.
The trees, palsy to our bad lines.
A flood, a cold faction.
Four dead cats under blackbirds in a row.
That cawing brings up the blood how
storms bring down the street.
The sparrow feather in your lung,
you could see it in the X-ray after they
dragged that body in.
None of us know this song backwards
to rebuild the slashed meadow underground.
So for the dead to carry us around,
they're stapled to lost passwords, tricking
no shame in what we unearth.
Loss is a feature of what you failed to divide yourself from.
More gossip by thumbtack.
Away from this now says something other
than the dead are forever under us.
And it gets its draggy nets out.
I get a moment in the bathroom and don't
know what alone to do with it.
Weather's been casting spells over this fucked-up town, now
bored that we can't fathom each other,
let alone cesspools, reedy sleuths, spools,
to clouds from all God's children
above their slant-wise, pillowy light.
The maps get watery and start moving us around like deer.
What's known fits into the heart of a single post
office in a small city.
So we copy out a long apology on paper towels
from a latrine as the sky marks a truce with its soft insides.
It's won, but won't gloat for clammy sorrow.
The mailman finally just brings me a strawberry pie.
And I let the phone ring, and ring, and ring, and ring,
and ring.
It's glorious, this ringing.
Now that bear rug's hung from an era
we no longer know to serve by speech or genuflection.
Fritz Cove Road dwindles down to a patch of currents.
We keep the yellow off our necks and line up for the hills
to rename us.
Here's what I go by now.
I go by Edgar Huntley now.
I go all over with this.
I go singing it now.
Woods do that, tugging, and put a watch on your brothers.
So how do you keep a river out of your house,
as the thieves just walk into the ditch
and lie down when the rains become a broom?
Until cemetery groundskeepers met him in the back of the bar,
he had asked me to hold the payphone receiver while I
was standing there with my dog.
What song drifts into you?
What bad song drifts from you to somebody else down storm
drains, the pull of our sacked city
gushing in pieces, everybody saying goodbye, and goodnight,
and off with you, then off with you, and yours,
and fondly, and off with you.
And I'll say off with you now.
Be gone with you.
Off on your way.
Nightgowns and hymnals of the so-called living,
tread nightly off.
Some chubby white reservoir towers are here.
But are we here also?
Dragoons and daguerreotypes carried out
no wars, thieves, songs, words, rhythms are this way known.
And the phone booth in the dream--
no, I'm on top.
And the river flood strands a mutt I don't know on a porch.
But it's not river water, proper.
It's fish, and shit, and people face down, floating by,
telephone lines, and some wires cabled into the muck.
No horror to come.
It is here.
And so my radio clicks on.
Nimbused the window with a cigarette lighter
she'd climbed out of.
It was one of those motel rooms with adjoining doors.
I give it a little knock.
It gives me a little knock back.
This girl may be seven, maybe eight in the tavern.
She's all tooth and freckles.
Asks, what's your dog's name?
It's Bella.
And wants to know if my dog has a heart, too.
So brindle Bella lets this kid lift her to her small ear
and says, I can hear something in your dog.
Her mother's in hip waders, fishing around
with a huge, willowy net.
The little girl and her two sisters--
yes, the messengers, now sing.
The mice scurry but are actually rearranging to say something I
just cannot know what, holding my cell phone as a lantern.
And dusk is gone.
Her mother stays out in the waters.
But the music of its lap starts sloshing going slap, slap.
So thread the pedal steel and voice,
lovely at breaking its own register.
Vipers do this and Geeshie Wiley can too.
Laughter carries its own corpulent history in gravel.
How light is projected from bored stars,
a little story with no yarn, no doorknob,
because wind is a deterrent and digging
is a method for distracting the living from the dead.
Gossip is the break in a forest where the recording
devices click back on to show us how sadness works in the loop.
The light you see cannot hear you,
a blessing the camera's refuse.
What follows us in is the long, white cables
we've hooked our cities to.
The trees, undoing what we claim to have claimed.
Deeds, gone that we said we'd do.
Gone also.
I, too, have come between ice shelves
to debase the coinage, or at least
song line the blooded now-known to your forebears.
Their fables, no longer what's used to keep us here.
We are used to keep us here.
River water, deep in us like declension.
It's not as though spiders follow up with us.
Now the sky gets blacker because that's what it's made out of.
What we sight, labors under the force of naming it.
Beyond pallbearers, no history makes itself up.
What we mean with history is just
a treadle for hagiography's dumb show,
rivering through your lines to a digger of grief under the ice.
That black box is now frozen, gerrymandering the Lord's--
Lord's-- Lord's experience with the bad story we'd whisper
along scanned notes.
Maybe Decoration Day meant bitters
at a coleopterous scattering, or how
to cozen your four fingers forward
into the purse dangling down.
A satchel of diamonds--
I'm right about that.
That's the transom an itty bit ajar.
Thanks for listening.