I watched a flock of swallows cross the rounded window glass of the Audi in front
of me, and a green plane of clouds curved as the glass curved and fractured softly
as though made of wool. I struck the bumper pretty hard. We were standing on the
street beside our steaming machines flapping our arms and shouting. Imagine if you
can her glasses filling with pink blossoms of the plum trees behind me. Then the
flock of swallows settling in those branches.
Silence in the shape of
paper mills, cloudlight
beats at the hills
where cicadas in
iridescent green armor
have agreed all-at-once
to die,
the ghost
of an Oldsmobile
drags Detroit
looking for the lost garage of prophecy,
summer snow
heaps against brick
subtracting what
little sun we’ve gathered
from the vast empty
spaces above Lake Huron,
the barely liminal
antenna
of the branches, this
snow-blind air
between buildings, a future
for which we
are nostalgic, even the priests
steal in this town,
even stop
signs resent their placement, it’s
dawn and the dead return
to private intractable
moods
under white grass, where our
trains and
northering all-day geese
pass over.
In heaven the unemployment office
gives out free bourbon...so what?
That’s not enough to make me a Christian.
I flip on the TV to watch myself
from above, thirty years ago,
running toward a line of barbed wire.
My first day of kindergarten I had a welding accident,
the horses abstracted by sheets of rain,
it’s not original that I want to film my own death.
This conversation is zoned semi-industrial,
which is just to say I miss you
and the tire tracks you leave in sand
with your little bare feet.
In heaven, the bus stations
have leather chairs and ottomans
to rest your feet on. Big deal,
I want a poetry to rest my feet on.
For example, an early dirty night
of Second Street, or
winter begins abruptly at 7
with some ravens in goldleaf.
Love enables one to accept.
This is the official hand gesture
of the 2012 Olympics.
Time bunches and folds
when I see you coming
wearing nothing but your shadow, the
balance of rage and sorrow so
perfect in me,
my mouth bows into a smile and the shoulders go
numb and slack, a total paralysis from which,
each morning, I issue down the steps
and into the streets of my city.
I have a few favorite
sentences which I pronounce
regularly
like an owl
caught in a cistern.
An owl caught in a cistern
soon learns to hover
then sleep in flight
its reflection rippling darkly on
the walls like a Warhol
film aired
in a porn theater.
And when by accident
a Warhol film airs
in a porn theater the men
are disappointed, then
resigned, then hypnotized
by time, until their mad little
hearts
quiet down, they begin to smell
cardamom and opium and lime
as from a great distance.