I'll just read one last section of this.
It's probably plenty for tonight.
We'll do this one, it's called--
they're both book length poems and they
both work in like this big kind of sprawl in a way.
But they're both broken into little bitty bits
and that's how I try to navigate it.
This section is called, "Boy-Scatter,
The Sleepier and the Sleepiest."
If each story depends on the part the teller forgets,
boy-scatter, sleeping pill sleep and twisted out splinter
from my neck in the dream.
One woman kicks another in the bus station waiting area.
Raccoons return to the cracks in the fence.
Is this what you meant by forgiveness?
Didn't the sockets do their job?
Were you ready and dressed when they clicked open the trunk?
Bluish wind and a spell turns somebody new gazebo to water.
Forgetting gets us into our bodies
tipsy with lack, tipsy with guessing.
Chatter and then smoke hang together in the doorways
where people huddle in the rain.
There must be exercises to adjust your eyes,
to the yellow, to darkness.
A thief of the museum's mummies, of the warped projector
and film canisters we found in the meadow behind the taverns.
The man tears out the page in the phone book
at the Pancake House.
These aren't even movie sets, this really is Arkansas.
Black fisted, tire swing, birds shatter, a kiss
dried on your forehead.
A squashed cricket like smell of the mismatched mountains
above crows, crumble, the shadows on the porch
and I drift numbly outside for the last trick of dusk
to stop me.
Our soup cools and the wind dies without our permission.
You will lay down tonight with all your clothes
scattered about you on the roof.
Did you say yes until it stopped happening?
Were there pieces in the street?
Did anybody see your name in the registry?
Post office posters of shrugging thieves who know the bank
tellers not by name, but by the scent of their golden perfumes.
Umbrella, the boy takes it from the hook on the lavender wall.
Tonight he thinks, rain will fill the basement,
then he'll shimmy up the tattered tree-house rope
rat like onto its little shingles
and let the storm do to me what a man can do
to another man in the street.
Crackles of laughter, a wet ghost
sings her widower's body shakily out of his shoes.
Twin sisters filling the restaurant with their laughter
from the unattended bathroom.
A man shorn off from the din hiding in a stall,
until the boy is forced to eat his father's cigarette.
He and his brothers row into the center of the river
to toss over the oars, the boat flung back from their bodies.
The second hour to fold in from dusk
scolds me, just loosens more boy-scatter on the roof.
But the light from my memory bristles in your eyes
onto your red cheeks which gives the soaked road
breeze a field of flowers to stick
to a gospel strain that drills little holes in your kneecaps.
Thief of all the other thieves' ladders.
The three prisoners escaped into the swamp-lands bickering
kept them together.
Hatchet, heavy is a baby.
Another question which starts with the word "if"
brings a man down like ellipses in a paragraph break.
I go walking watching for foxes perpendicular
to the canal hoping you get home and under the covers before me.
Here is the gift of snow.
The way it never seems to come or last, but feels
inevitable even effortless when it does.
And finally boxes raggedy the color of copper coins
or whatever is made from copper anymore that they
put in to your hand as they bring you to your feet
and send you on your way.