The Ocean's Anatomy

the lemon cries there within her mask,
her soul in the shriveled rind walks without shoes, somewhere
in the puckered mouth of the dozing master, the landscape
deserted, his
blue lips kissing
dead women about their
grave, empty-pail feet. spinning, spinning,
the lemon sings a sea around itself; she is the seamstress
conjuring, so it floats. Some still
even
call it yellow
in the tomb gray aura of her new home.
the mussels have finally been convinced to come up from their coffins.
the shells have cracked so slightly
just a fraction of their roars are heard. but it is enough.
ears also grow in the salt-ferns like rubber shells
almost by god action; and the cities rise from the drain,
colossal toes lift like castles, it is a creature made entirely of
words
scrubbing silt from its skin. it opens its mouth, swallowing whales
boulders, islands, houses, dawn…and down
goes the lemon, its seeds
telling stories like circles of fire to the bottom

Corn Stalks

I hear them as they
scrape
their fingers
up the pale staircase

down the corridor,
these black clowns of fall,

strips
of decrepit
love
like abandoned
widow webs.

They rattle their ribs in the new-fangled
cage of November.

Somehow no one sees their body.
It is left underneath a sheet of yellow light

for me

the mystery of their death
emerges in the darkness like a man entering the room
with a syringe

It grows
complex
and has too many fingers for my hands,
for the iodine brown dots of my eyes.

The field’s history begins with winter mud.

It is still as the white house
whose inhabitants have
moved away.

Horse Head

The boney cluster
of thought revoked
its
one-time
story: This is who I am…
it’s nothing but bias.

This was born when I was born.

The car screamed underneath
lights
and my mother
put her two feet
in the air
(only one of them socked)
and the sound of something breaking
came through in

1982.

Still going, my thoughts have become
good pets.

Pets in all
the
typical meanings
of that word.

The crazy ward sleeps
beneath me
upon pillows of dust;

the lobster of marriage
turns
hemorrhage-red
in the possibility of time’s passage;

donkeys ride out blizzards
on the backs of their whip-tongue masters;

pathogens are added, finally,
to lists.

my mother grows no more

the body stopped

the singular face is not a face any more
it is hundreds of faces
it is a whole life of people,

stars wane

still

a whitish guild
in the air

Magnificent and heavy as the wheelbarrow
urn,

she has slid
now
into time

This Brain

What is this brain?

I see it

moving

like a crippled butterfly
in the air

It amuses me,

it makes me laugh
I laugh like it laughs, I
see like it wants me to see

It builds angels and Sequoia

it builds the ant
and a bridge in Oregon, it conjures

faces, feelings
it always starts like this, doesn’t it?

Alone in a bathtub, the
TV
on somewhere else

watching the water take on your heartbeat.

The tiles
dwelling as the same tiles they were yesterday, smiling.

What are these lungs? This
heart? This hair?

Why was I made this way? Born with a
penis and hands and ears, I’m another one, Ok--

it reminds me of the misgrowths
upon wild fruit,
insect larvae, lucky to have
burst
into this spontaneous shape
and not some
horrifying mistake.

I think

the blood still pushes through my veins, a train
swaying
quietly
in its tunnel

until…

really, it can manage a good amount of things,
figure them, solve them. Draw them.

It is a good friend,

so we drink wine together. We put our arms
around one another
with love.

But we also kill one another, because
there’s so much

we can’t do;

we laugh and die

we sit atop
thousands of years of quietness
together

a mirror looking into a mirror

as one match goes down into the water,

and the sound
of that water

as it
drains in the dark.

Healing

This is what it always is,
healing,
and what it should be, really.
Still feeling the
long grass
as you sat in it, contemplating death
in October before an empty house.
Still awakening
sick, without that normal verve,
and kneeling
together with no one
to mime your mother on her saddest
days.
It’s when the healing ends, I think,
that everything wanes.
It sighs
and reclines into a chair,
like a widower who
did not love his wife.
And it comes
as the alcoholic burning
of years
down the throat.

things that happen in winter

the white dog conjured
the ghost
across a dry pool.
a speech is given
by a politician
with no sense of smell
no nose
he was the only one
who seen it.
ice has frozen in there now.
it’s the first ice. and
a bird has turned into
nothing but string
in the street. it is a violent
memory, her
form. twine.
a skeleton of twine
and the politico’s
echo, the trees like
tattered ship sails,
her wings out, still not
string
and held up
by the very coldness