The grass grows without our permission

I am inside each house that passes
somehow,

and my lineage is inside each house. Historically,
I am finite, in this zipped-up costume.

My grandfather sits at the upright
and has learned how to play.

My grandmother
warms

her own ashes in a saucepan by the fireplace.

She smiles like the dusty pages of a book.

Houseplants here represent time.

Four
cats are one grim reaper

and instead, discuss the next move in private.

Where I Travel To

The cat disappeared into the dark—
this was his music, sad and ancient.

But smiling. Where on earth?
I fastened myself to the future with a set of pins.

Felt my way to the tomb. My family was waiting there.

The sounds were the brilliant beginnings
and ends of other sounds.

Buildings of sleep pushed up, and on the
other ends of the blowing streets, buildings of wakefulness.

This city and its sounds were dilemmas of thought.
Who worked them into these porous surfaces?

Butchers at their tables. Pathologists. Nuns.

Hearing. Slow canto.
The gleaming one piece of my eye.

Action then in the terrified room:
the storytelling old men of war, the harps.

The Grove of Graves Like Flowers

I like looking at the other side—the side

that’s not
opposed

to death.

The side that accompanies us to the beach, and moves us
like marionettes. The side that

grows a new face every second,

tufts of grass like hair flowing to the water.

A sugar
factory, small, emitting sweet gusts.

A blackbird flies
through

the lines of a bridge. He is constant. I am not

as soccer players suffer in the hot field.

Night Gang

The Siamese twins water my plant, and look at me
with their one heart beating, and their one stomach
churning dinner.

An Archangel
opens the fridge, eats a hard-boiled egg,
goes to sleep on my side of the bed, nuzzles my wife.

There are not many eyes and not many nights in the night,
and not many puppets in this night of eyes.

Who then
dances in there

like a little drum? I’ve been replaced by an
imposter.

Too Bad

The sun is suffering from dementia.

Sad old broad.
We found her in the poorhouse, air-conditioning
on high, hiding her face because she could not
recognize it.

This was upsetting, of course, to all of us. We looked in the fridge for something
to eat.

Just onions hugging other onions.
We are accustomed to certain things.

Call the ambulance, she said.

The apples are crawling up the wall.

Guarini Speaks

The prophet of insignificant
events—he speaks from inside of a shoehorn.

His
houseplant

has cracked a joke in the meantime,
a dead smile

upon his mother’s face, blooming original as
decay

as she responds, encouraging
shame for the subject matter.

There is a white
shrieking figure somewhere
in the painting.

He waxes on the comedy of a corkscrew, and still

the plant insists on dying,
the mother cries at the whitened mirror,

his speech is extracted from the
Earth

with forceps, a snail

sliding out
of the cloud