Milk Scent
Mardi Gras Cake
Grief
Sleepless Cats Lie
Maple Piss Poem
Cryptoanthropology
A Terrible Sameness
Milk Scent
My grandmother believed
that dangerous snakes
responded to the scent of milk:
driven by thirst, they haunted
our cows, crept down sleeping
children's throats, into
other dark places.
In the morning, I stir with a still
sleeping snake curled
in my belly. The bowl of milk
sits near my mouth. My tongue
might brush its lip,
it is that close.
Mardi Gras Cake
a plastic baby in every cake
The heat of the oven is a joy, she thinks.
Her pale wrap eases and expands,
bowing regretfully back from the flesh.
Her arms extend, her pink fingers twitching
within the balloons of warm air. The smell
of batter is a blessing, she hopes. The wet cloak
of flour stiffens into sponge, beneath this
darkening and sugary veil. The shallow pits
of her nostrils tremble toward the egg
and vanilla. The taste of dry cake is prayer,
she believes. Leavening the plastic spirit
tempers, without searing, skin. The oven's well,
deep and wide, and its crowded pews all
quietly recalling the same shimmering whisk,
fade beneath a slight pressure of cake
crumbling on her motionless tongue.
Grief
for Townes van Zandt
In Jack Yeats' painting Grief, one horse,
a proud scribble of white, edges toward
the receding margin. The carted bier
of a warrior pushes itself, somewhere behind
their uneven line, knowing that such horses
as these might abandon him, alone
on this canvas, absent remorse.
Yeats' blue soldiers shove ahead, bending
backward in their haste. The surviving
marshal, this tattered Napoleon, lifts his arm,
his saber, and one pitted eye toward the dry
yellow smoke that drifts along
the surface of the canvas - a breathless
maritime pilgrim contemplating
that far skin of the water.
In a country this large, only the borders
will keep you alive. The roan horse
of Freedom dissolves into
unbounded landscape, pale pieces
of river and sky opening as bloodless
gaps in her flesh. The urgent hooves
spin thick clumps of mud, the hind legs
a washed blur of green weed.
Freedom is not
the limning artist.
Grief is not
this disheveling horse.
Sleepless Cats Lie
Kara tells me she wakes each morning
to strike the alarm clock and holler, "Fuck!"
But I wake to the harsher sounds of my cat:
her insistent murmuring beneath the door
and a relentless scratching, percussive
against the soft wood.
Sometimes, I know,
even before that sound I wake - roll over
heavily, sigh-and only then the cat hears,
and she responds
at three-thirty this morning,
or yesterday at four o'clock. In the living room,
unsteady still, I hold the darkness and remains
of sleep just two breaths longer.
Day's sun
will sketch like sudden wind across these lines
of fresh charcoal, dusting this dust.
Daisy purrs
and I lift her up, reaching
only now for light. She stretches, trying
to find me here, so I lean low, putting
my face to hers, our whiskers touching.
Maple Piss Poem
for Ed Sanders, I suppose
In the morning, my urine smells,
not of ammonia, but of stale milk.
I scrape a white pith from my tongue
with a cracked thumbnail-congealed,
like the warm curds we would find
in cereal bowls on summer afternoons.
I quit shooting crank in 1983;
years later, its familiar chemical taste
would swell unexpectedly against the roof
of my mouth-just as this odor rises
now, on the shower's steam, the acrid
numbness of my own nostalgia.
I remember an Anabaptist child then,
the one whose urine smelled of maple
syrup, that cloying sickness which recalled
buried calendars and tree stands far
from our stalled train - stranger, infant,
and the anxious Mennonite mother.
Cryptoanthropology
And then sometimes I think I must
have been the Piltdown Man,
sliding into and out of my own jury-rigged existence
on one slick glissade,
flesh never even having formed until
bone is scraped clean, pitted and undug -
emeried and epoxied -
a skeleton re-constructed before creation,
a death breathing back into my life.
A Terrible Sameness
for Barbara Lee
How odd to hear our politicians quoting Yeats:
"All is changed, changed utterly,"
And those solemn pundits, who solemnly intone,
"From this day on, our world will be forever different."
At first I believed them.
It was impossible to imagine going back
To doing the same job, in the same manner,
Echoing those same empty words
We have exchanged so many empty mornings.
Then, as I watched, it began to happen:
The President, perhaps, was first,
With his Secretaries of Hate and War.
Congress quickly fell behind,
Even that all too loyal opposition,
The same dull suits in the same dark corridors.
I heard those politicians mouth
Speeches I had heard them mouth before,
Heard ministers who preached
A gospel of vengeance I remembered well,
Watched eager patriots who waved
Familiar flags, still damp with familiar blood.
A hundred times I watched the tower fall,
And it always fell into the same ruin.
A renewed commitment to an old disease
Is never the same as a new beginning.
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