WEBVTT

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And this next poem
was written after I

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had the experience of watching
my son Elijah and his younger

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brother Bennett in the Old
Masters' Museum in Brussels.

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And they stood in front
of Breugel's canvas

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The Fall of The Rebel
Angels for several minutes.

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And it was a fun
thing to watch happen.

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And so this poem came
out of that experience.

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It's called Fifteen.

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Oh, I'm going to shout
things out occasionally.

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And those are my children
shouting things out.

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Terrapin!

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Tentacle!

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In the atrium brightness,
my son's delight presses

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so close to the canvas the
guard coughs a caution.

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The commotion of
wing and fang that

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is Breugel's Fall of the Rebel
Angels hangs like a trespass.

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Claw!

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Carapace!

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Like a curious cabinet had
sex with a scavenger hunt.

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Salamander!

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Halfway headlong down his hurtle
one handles in his demonic fist

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a fish basket finned
with switches.

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Another faller sledges
into swallowtail.

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The fleshy edges of his lewdness
startled with butterfly finery.

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A third hurdy-gurdy!

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is girt with the
garnet and sudden gold

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wings of the Lucifer bird.

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Every peculiar pursued
to its foundering

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is part something else.

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Armadillo!

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Esquire!

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As agog at itself as
at an ambush of angels.

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My angels half plunged into
each your own strangeness.

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Gangly and almost
in need of a shave.

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Amphibian!

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Astrolabe!

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As the transiting sun
through the window pane

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frames you momentarily still in
your mutual conclave of puzzle

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and name, I observing can guess
why the heavens mustered taking

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to trumpet and frantic buckler.

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Some with swords would
arrest that reverseless.

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Pufferfish!

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Fall!

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Holding fast their once
familiars by force.

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But see in the ether a flourish
of grasses, a mass of seraphs

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suspended weaponless.

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I suppose those horns
clarion, not in discord,

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but in blessing.

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A benediction on the dim
bewildered way ahead,

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which as yet, they do not
know, and so cannot regret.

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