they say, come now down
the violin-welted and finger-drunk sky,
painting a winter-bark mouth,
ceramic-blue-mad-scratching;
angela and sylvia are humming
clay-sparrow crimes,
7-4-3 and its reverse---
where thigh-dress country roads
bird-pop-chatter and fork,
way down where white-washed
spellings of god-crossed words
are acoustic hymen painted fish.
their house is hazel frost,
crows and bees,
venus-glass-beautiful---
scallop-plain men now gone,
apple-oil a shelter
of daubing mud and dabchick birds.
come down, come down,
electric and violet salmon-green sky,
open a copper pouring,
angela and sylvia are crane-tooth-whispering,
keeping forked secrets from dog men.
The winds must come from somewhere when they blow, There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
W. H. Auden
Angela sits mesh smoking, drinking lost
tea stains from her empty glass,
brown bird hands making ten
fingers seem like twenty-four.
A still child born in her every word,
she rattle-pops split-skirt letters,
ravenous fish statue words,
crimson bullet questions. I think about
vegetable soup and cannibals,
two hungers I should have already used
together in a war poem.
Have you slept much? Have you spoken
to Joseph? Is he still spiders in the mouth,
clack-smacking rain? Is your little
boy grown still a yellow twitching horror?
Her hack-ear questions sound like so
much mud drinking, six feet down
bitter-fisted whoring. I listen,
her words begin to bend and wobble.
Blue cold is crawling hesitantly as war wounded
children over brown fields, beneath an amorphous
sun that winter has killed and then sung about,
then covered with a moss gray sheet---
We are tired, our eyes mangled, bloody,
our bones stained wood of buried saints---
celestial only in their own domain.
Limping crows are searching for ploughed corn,
all the while drinking their own blood with a
courageous lust that howls and howls;
if not them, then someone else.
I can only remember times when I speak
without thinking, everything else
is a massive scar and deafening lie.