Scared Of Mouse Turds

My eyes don’t work anymore.
I stand at the front of miles of gods.
Their overalls are unkempt, they do not have jobs.
I search the desert ground like they search churches;
for ministers, for prognosticators, for
fools.
And when I sweep them up I
ask the word
will Wonder bread ever make a noxious poison?

The Pain Gallery

They’ve opened it on the weekend for me.
Closed the blinds, put a slow dirge upon the speakers
as patients skulk in overgrown pajamas; a security guard
is made out of melting wax.
Outside, the lake is larger than it once was, it is a glacier
now
and it’s
tearing apart its white geometry.
Terrible junction of memory and sculpture.
An infant shark
squeezing its gills on a red bed with brass ends,
and a suit that suffocated its man.

It Occurred To Me

Simic was following me.
He’d been to the pub and sat in my booth,
wore my pants, played darts with a tarot card reader
he’d married in New Mexico.

He had no face--just an old shoe there.
His scarf was wrapped around his shoe-head
and his glasses flew into my hand like a bird.

“What if you ran into yourself
on the street,” he said.“And thought
that they deserved
just a little bit of suffering?”

He was in a blue tuxedo; a frog in his pocket muttered the alphabet.

He goes on to tell me
how he’d been busy spooning poached pears
into my mother’s mouth:

(“She’s circling dimensia,” he said. “She talks to cremated things.”)

and how my father’d left his
teeth in a Tennessee courtroom.

How did he find them? I thought.
He makes all of the dandelions molt…

“Hocus pocus,” he says and inserts six or seven maraschino cherries
into his mouth. “Fly to the beach. You bite so sensually.”

Company

Rain had turned the snow into
shrunken little nuns.
There was something waxy about the morning,
something akin to a pitcher of water at a wake.
We coasted along the river in a nest,
our feet in the cold wind,
and listened to our personal despot’s symphony
sing from his head which was a parakeet’s;
and the movement was about my mother
and yours. Birdbrain. He shut up when we reached
the bridge.

Nearing The Largest Stone On Earth

I can almost see the pieces of white hair
at the dented ears, the eerie lips, the eyebrows
growing mushrooms. It faces the ocean, a pensive
dominator. You cannot see his mansion, which he left
when the mother died, turned the bathtub into a tomb,
the halls unsightly with their unctuous water, rooms
turned into beaches and clams sat in their chairs,
wormy retired folk toasting with steins of blood.
Our histories are skulls full of creamed corn, antique
plates with anguished faces; The sky has a silver head,
rising and curtseying to its master, the ground,
as wars are spread out across the earth like fire ants.
The trees begin to back away.
Napoleon leers in its shadow, The Tollund Man
has finally removed his noose but keeps his leather hat,
groves of pitcher plants close and open like eyeless
monks.
And with returning we slow our return.
Walking is common among the garden;
you were sixty feet tall at its base, and the view was
exquisite.

It Used To Be Fun

A man walks lazily about in purgatory.
He wears pajamas and a gold watch, no shoes. His
fingernails have grown into delightful little wands.

Purgatory is a theater
with a swimming pool in the center.

Paper all over the floor, an audience
murmuring
in unseen halls.

Plenty of seats.
Plenty of old friends.

Only
by the end,
everybody’s crying, the man too.

He buttons up his baggy blue trousers.
He puts his obsolete
genitals
back in the pocket.
He takes off his wristwatch because he is too ashamed to wear it anymore.
He wants to lose consciousness.

He steps into the pool
fighting with this.

But that’s not the way out.

Corned Beef & Root Beer

And it occurs to you: it’s happening.
It’s real. You taste it. It’s there.
goddamn it, everything else at stake
suddenly
seems edible,
tame, like
sugar.

Mass

The batteries in the clock are dead
or crazy.

As I undress in the dark, my mind is wrapped in a woolen quilt.

She snores, my dear, my dear snores
What else?
A kitchen sound. On the roof
something scratches—mice with
Death masks
flying kites as
sharps as knives.
I will take their place soon.

I let one eye crack open
and look at her head. It looks like a hill, a battlefield.
The herd sleeps in the grass, their heads
sniffed by Bengal tigers.

My heart has been polished under its fabric.

She snores

and weakness flutters out of her mouth
like a moth.