This next poem is called "The Horseshoe."
I can't read the small print in the scrapbook.
Does this say, relinquishing all bats,
feeling faint on the balcony?
There is so much to be corrected here,
so many scribbles and grumbles, blind premonitions.
How does one interpret on this late branch, the unexpected?
I can see just here that strength was gathering, perhaps
even an excess, and, specifically,
the heart-rending detail of the horseshoe
found propped against the windowsill.
Years of toil to find the right angle,
I'm almost rigid with anticipation, maneuvering as
at an opera intermission.
Stropping the razor, occasional whining, exploits of idleness,
all are clenched against the teatime eventuality.
The progenitors with their inspired plaintive skeletons
engulf us here for several pages,
then sink like migrating hooves.
What happened to them?
I trusted their wings, their heroic gusto methods.
I am shaving this gossipy impetus like rigid articles
away from my face.
I see the corrections penciled in.
I'm privy to their forgetfulness, a sprawling
design.
I look away and project streaks of hesitant
chance wherever I look.
Pulsating veins of thin planks to help
me bridge this muscular aria.
Aslant the tone of life's dialogue between siestas,
the horseshoe diversion is polished,
its legs degenerating, athletically anyway.
It's all in the ankle of the wind, in breeding bones.
Scrapbook, I am in the middle of your hive.
I must take back your corrections
to the mute and infirm stretches of my own big shave,
swell the parallel world with your murky burden, still
betting against this charm nailed
to the side door of a photograph to ward off, what was it?
Was it me?
I don't have to explain to you.
You're this expert poetry audience.
I don't know.
Everybody else's family seems to make more sense to them
than mine does to me.
I don't know why.
I've been trying for years to piece it together a little bit,
and it just doesn't make any sense.
It just doesn't make any sense at all
why anybody did anything.
I mean, would you cross the prairie, you know,
2,000 miles or more in a covered wagon in 1850 if your last name
was-- if your name was James Nail to open a hardware store
in downtown Kansas City, a city of 500 people and call it
Nail's?
[LAUGHS] I mean, I thought people
crossed all that distance to seize land and do
grand things, [LAUGHS] not to open up a little nail shop.
[LAUGHTER]