January 16th: Recovery Relapse Relapse Recovery

January 16^th:  SEE(Recovery Relapse Relapse Recovery)SAW

heroin is a Cinderella shoe you never fit into

a fluid tattoo in your plasma and the rest of you

stumblebum you a paper boat of ice-out. 

What’s step one from the precipice and then how far is it to that first

                                bot

                                                t

                                                                om?

Is there some thrum tadum thrum unsung but shoved up the inside

skin of the eardrum and stuck there and struck when the who gives

a flying fuck what  stick is pulled and whipped through the air and down

on your skull?  Is there some silence then there after the rubber draws

the vein altar high and the prick is a down on your knees relief even

before the blood’s tongue laps (the vein’s an open maw now)

and pants and groans unhinged.  And all the grinding stones stop

grinding and all the glass bowls overflowing hold to their brim

and the floor is clean and shit’s ok and the sick was weeks ago

now and the kids are happy and the husband loves you and he’s back

in your bed and man there are roses and they smell good what

starts it what stops it what starts it up again again again it’s not will

or want to at least I’d like to think for you but seeing you seesaw

flat face an inch from the soup I made for you when  you came out

finally and fumbled your bum in the chair and sat half hip in it there’s no 

denial you were getting started again and your injection (a pill on a plate

for you no needle) using you more than you using it--shit--sitting there

on a surface of who cares who goddamn cares and some band starts

to playsway in your head and you high flame your face and hair and skim straight

over the bowl and you drip with it and smash because you’re too heavy

your face on the table leg and you wave and fly fly you fly and I hand

under your elbow your arm lift you escort you back to the bedroom

you’ve reclused to and truck you to the commode then to the low

mattress (so if you fall you won’t fall far) and you strong now somehow

twitch and seize and spill your shit and it’s this it’s this that’s one

of the last bottoms I know for you using all those years flying high into

silence all that silence you bought and sold your life for.

January 15th: Balm of Your Salt and Bog

January 15^th: Balm Of Your Salt and Bog

that

   fondled

     them

     when

     they

     were

   Fire

will gleam

and

understand

                                                Emily Dickinson

Best now to go knowing into the dark

to scent the way rather than to guess

to breathe the way with lung and hung

aloft alone and head back only after

as tide curls up quiet, nearer to blood

thick moss and tongue harrow

some of his lung of what the dark alone

trowels, what I trowel when I arrive: come let me

lift you to my mouth now I’ve reached

you, stumbled some on the way and

I say this is best: a fragrance of your night-

train freight memorizing

the ferment of our two bodies

fused fusing tell me

knowing you this way to fading

to day a blue phlox I inhale

in the brain of my nose

and hold it close in the day, shallow

through noon through gloaming

I know below, deep deep below

I’ll go into it: aroma my only coal

so at home in your breathing, let

like blood let like I’m the one

nose who isn’t blind to you

a perfume like roots a perfume

of you to tune in breath tune  

breath until dark turns darker

still darker more to again find you

January 13th: Peace by Piece: How He Reconciles His Theft

January 13^th: Peace by Piece: How He Reconciles His Theft

However fragile, callow and uncouth

Brazen and shy, at least once, in her youth,

                Everyone standing free of clothes before

Her pensive mirror will look just like Truth.

                                               

                                                Tesserae

                                                John Hollander

He makes me think: how do they do it with these clay bits these sherds of pot

                broken stone

does he make the whole piece open out cold and total

raw known

and maybe from a ladder or pole hoist himself

completely alone

above the splay of green gray near mosaic the unbroken display first

soap and foam

of her own naked life, her alone come alive after her bathing, his hand brings

soft groans

in her throat on a cold February morning where, pictured, not old enough

to own

her own role in the whole tragic affair but only so far as her worth

in gold

and to go out, alone, beyond the stone breakwater later on,

ocean foam

thrown, her naked nose her elbow and yes of course

you know

because she is totally without her clothes he’s raised this mosaic

in stone

and floating above it is finally broke, broke, he is broke

to go

down the pole

and with one blow

hammer her nearly to dust and when he’s through, his fever’s set

below

his brow and on his mouth she is drowned and he’ll sweep

each moan

piece by piece by bloody piece, make her tesserae, tesserae in his lung’s pocket

alone

January 13th: Who Are You, Making Room

January 13th: Who Are You, Making Room?

And what does the room know of her outward bravery and

It’s hard adornment?

                                                John Hollander

                                                “Behind the Beaux-Arts”

Maybe it’s the one desire we don’t know we’re born compulsed to

do: take into our own two hands our clay our stone

our sawn bones of oak laid low to plainer and frame

a room one room that bears us out of the womb of it:

sluice by bloody sluice of this wet clay and grain coming alive

under our touch and where we start is entirely

our own signature.  For me, even before it is the hovering

almost reluctant touch: scent by nose and throat

and though I am no lion, through the crowd I’d know

smelling you, I’d go for the mouth first and worse

the tongue of your wet warm words and nose over

your fence of teeth, ignore the broke, the capped, and go

straight for the root of your room: taste how you see,

high as you are, the edges of paintings coming undone

from their skin of gild.  But for how they’re hung it’s not

the color but blood on my tongue: some we take to bed

only once and still: all the planks have breathed beneath

the roof in the house all winter.  The heat’s been on and they,

after all those clearing days, long log haul days, come into

the blade days, wait in the yard days they come

together in the room you’ll make a room for me in: OHHH

but go slow old man, please with your lips and raise

no splinter before you fit and fit and fit doves and tongues

all sawn by hand in your room now gone mostly to dust

in  your room above us falling on youmewee falling once

as stone or glass blown or wood toned bone by bone by bone

January 12th: Outgoing: at the City Bus Stop

January 12^th: Outgoing: At the City Bus Stop

What an expression: the elephant in the room--

what a way to keep it whatever it is

chained at the back leg and swaying

a cargo full sail, and right? what else could it be

ears like that and a rough trunk

four stump legs and feet that feel the words

of sound come up from the ground it's like

the way deaf musicians lay their face

against the oak of their bass

and hum a tune to the tune of it all

and by the Grace of God the song the song

I’ll tell you my elephant if you tell me yours

listen it’s late and the poor lady’s been in line

all day long and not been called on

but she’s got time, she’s a patient kind

and benign and maybe that’s why

everybody thinks they can ease on by

and she’ll sway her big boat sway and they’ll make it

with their hat in their hand because something

like her deserves everything you’ve got by way

of respect even if it just your bare head.

Hell some come by and strip right down to the mute

skin mute hands and soles bruised and stay all day

and through the nights besides and these they say

are the survivors: of camps and killing fields

of happiness houses and sold for hats little girls

are boys with bayonets

on the end of their guns

are girls with bayonets

on the end of their uterus.

You won’t know them though, folks like these.  You see,

closer to home, an old soccer ball roll across the road

and hear the rubber (smell it too) long after

the world stopped forever for that mother

and that 19 year old driver--I’ll tell you

they too know elephants.  Don’t we all.  Don’t we

arrive every day with our eyes and our mouths.

Our throats and noses.   Don’t we climb the side

of that elephant, since her hip’s bad, that’s least squeaky?

And doesn’t she let us ride and ride  and the room is wide?

Who’s born who’s died who’s got fried chicken and rice?

Who’s seen Caesar who’s seen Jesus who’s cleaned

whose ass and why.  Listen: the mountain snow’s piling

it’s piling high and where are you and your elephant going to be

come spring?  What shovel are you going to bring?  Gear or no

it’s not waiting.  Take her out of the chain

the savannah the plains are a big big place and she ain’t going

nowhere far.  Get wise to her and that’s the truth.   Get wise

and that’s the truth: she’s under your skin.  She’s

where you’ve been.  Where you’re going

to have been.  Everyone’s coming to see.   Make good.

Come clean.  Listen before you speak.  Listen

before you speak.

January 11th: Stone Etcher

January 11^th: A Sculptor A Stone An Etcher Alone

I wonder: how does one go into stone

                cutting, choose to smooth the block

                quarried from the deep below moss

                and water for the eternity of dates
                and dashes and names?  Does a grand

                father do it maybe or a father?  Does
                a guy just fall into it hard and forever?

                And then does this guy ever walk the gallery

                up and down hills in and with trees

                and think this is mine--see--

                and raise his face to the rain?

Today most go through machine, see each

                engraved face scanned into 0’s and 1’s

                the screen of these being what we’ll see

                and voila! after a button and time

                and dust pulled up out of the air

                it’s a man and his best bird dog

                in black granite to last the deep years

                walk with his gun and the sun

                in his favor and a quiet retriever.

I’m thinking it must’ve been more intimate

                just hands letters and stone 

                and a blank slate (excuse the pun)

                and he comes in the broadest light

                this guy and at the right height, I don’t know

                hip, right?  to keep the elbows free

                to swing and sweep free.   This intimacy

is a different marriage entirely, a mistress convincing

                this never-in-your-lifetime-anything-but-the

                stone to glow, to go soft along the line

                to let a man not climb but settle within,

                beyond:  Here lies the second wife

                prayer, she’s lived a long life and a widow

                besides.  Only a choke at the throat

                poor guy, opening (and only he knows)

                the small mouth of the lamb

                a new mother and her child…

Hand carved them.  Lambs.  Solid stone

                ghosts, lowing as though their nose

                will always go into the sometimes mown

                sometimes grown to choking grass that years

                later a lady may pull away and say

                baby baby and take the afternoon, maybe

                the whole day that way.

He has to say, seeing her, a mother he thinks,

   and then making his own boy’s stone

   or maybe not has to but does anyway, out loud

                because he cuts alone, I remember when I made you,

                I remember making you, your mother’s robe fell

                open and that was the first time I’d ever seen

                an eclipsing areola, mocha gold and a pebble

                nipple tip under my rough thumb.  I think I rubbed

                and rubbed and she came up under my hand

                a mirror of water and I buried myself

                there in her.  I let my eyes drown

in that soft dark because days are dates and names

                and straight lines they’re knives and blades, flakes

                chipped away they are slips of paper

                prayers I can say, lips to stone to blow low,

                tell me, what letter does a long lungful of air

                begin with and is it the drawing in I start with,

                nose to throat, hold and the dust of your stone

                low low lying down there low, or is it

                the letting go, through cheeks and teeth

                wet, whet, when I polish, cold?

January 10th: Digging Tunnels With My Kid Brother

January 10^th: Digging Tunnels With My Kid Brother

 for I was on my way to a life of buying

untouched drive shafts, universal joints,

perfect bearings so steeped in Cosmoline

they could endure a century and still retain

their purity...

                                                           Philip Levine

                                                           Buying and Selling

no sandbox but the sea and a glass bottle boat

                we’d float in the old sewer runoff

                when the tide was out

no route for cars but dilapidated Tonka trucks

                rusted and one flat tire and five hundred

                feet of driveway road

no cold milk but warm just shook powder blue

                thin charity he drank and drank

                and I gave him mine

we held hands under the bed and shaked

                away the boogeymen

                in warm going cold piss pants

we watched the sea come back in

                without our little boat

                and i walked home alone

we drove our frontend loader off the road

                and i walked home

                alone

i gave him my blue milk because

                he was always hungrier

                than me

i watched his hand grow bigger

                bthan mine and watched

                fhim empty it from mine

and today if I want to prove it all

                meant something still

                means something

                                i buried a small bottle out in the garden

                                underneath the snow.  I planted it the autumn

        he took sober and got the gauze

        off his wrists for good.

        come spring and after a heavy rain

                                i’ll lift it out of the tunnel of runoff

                                and if I want it to 

                                mean something more than glass

                                fragile as his forty year black

                                i’ll wait for it to ache more

                                than the blue milk we were both

                                hungry for though him always more

                                always more

January 9th: Cardiac Arrest

January 9^th: Cardiac Arrest

The first time I ever drew a nude I remember her

blue veined wrists--maybe because we began

at the obvious hip--her simple curve and shape

the way she’s a landscape all her own, of mown

hayfields and roads coming up to them though only

this time of year, after the hay’s made,

and a palm to a palm enough of praying a few days

of no rain.  One year, late, maybe just

this side of safe enough to bale and take up

that temporary road, a cloud hung us back a mile

or so and the wind waited and nobody moved. 

The truck was full and idle and the fumes stood still.

It was an eclipse of the sun though none of us knew

and we, jaw-awed fought for the best view, climbing

the top of the wheel-well, the top of the hay, dust

and chaff slapped away…even the flies were quiet.

And Old Man Berry, a worker not a talker, gave us each

a turn with the green welding glass.  When he held it out

to me his naked white wrist was throbbing hard,

ba-blue, ba-blue, ba-blue, and I took the rest

of the afternoon with him and the cool thermos water,

day old biscuits.  We didn’t talk at all and the raw

dark absorbed us while we passed that glass back

and forth back and forth and his breathing calmed

and his blood pulled back to pace.  We sat easy,

quiet, still in the shaved hay, shadowless free.  He thanked

me.  To see him in her naked wrist, he’s long dead

now, was it maybe in the way she sat and then without

seeming to move at all, how she shifted her hips

to reposition?  Like that dark afternoon..We must've moved, bones

skin, we must’ve.  I can’t remember an ache or even going 

home.  It was the old man and the sun closing up

early just after two, like it had tsomeplace else to be, 

like the earth knew and forgot and kept on, or, more,

couldn’t bring itself to stop spinning when she, after

all that cover-up, started getting comfortable again, pulling

cloud by cloud on a clear day, taking off the veil,

the snood-blue veil, an old man’s, a nude woman’s wrist,

a coming back to life sky.

January 8th: Thoughts on my Father's Shovel

January 8^th: Thoughts on My Father’s Shovel

barely above zero the snow,

what fell and fell and fell

the afternoon long and on

into the night is gone

hard, thick as his work

hands, hands the wood end

of a shovel’s more forgiving

of than a woman gone sour

during the work day.  what’s

best for me and seeing is this:

when my son and I walk in

old antique stores, among

the rows of old farm tools,

their cracked handles, their

rusted blades: sickle, scythe, hoe,

all those that open a hole in

their coming into home, grass

or soil, hole after hole the size

of the completed arc or thrust.  My

father’s post hole diggers.  His

three tined hay rake he’d take

to the barn to pierce away a day’s

worth of shit and hay, and that

square ended shovel that hung

by the shed door, a handle

hard as the cow’s horn and just

as smooth.  All those tools

are dust now and rust , ash

in the hole they buried the house in

after it fell, smoldering, to

their feet.  They patted the top

the way I’ve seen my grandmother

pat the top of her potted roses,

tender as a clean dressing

change only my mother could

touch when my father came home

after weeks and weeks away

and no hand to speak of just

mounds and mounds of gauze

and pins that stuck out like tv

antennae.  It was winter then too,

and bitter.  All his tools went

still, cobwebbed in corners,

their smooth handles the first

girl or boy I ever touched.  Imagine

how much warm friction it takes

to wear down a new tool  to the like

of a lover?  Imagine all that

momentum.  Start at the reach, then

at the grasp, and then, at the hip,

pull back the favored foot and as

the arc perfect, the strobe and stroke

like a piston in the palm

the only oil your heat and blood

and time.  Imagine coming

home to that. 

After that fire I never saw

any of those tools again.  Until one

December and my mother’s urn

and the crumbling frozen earth. 

And the grave wasn’t deep enough,

the engine on the backhoe wouldn’t

start.  Shit but it was cold up there

in the old garden.  Smoke below

in the channel, you know, the salt

water warmer somehow than the air.

And a man came back from the cellar

of the new house with a shovel. 

Grabbed the first thing I saw

he said and I watched man after man

widen and deepen, three feet

up to and past their knees, then

the hip.  The shh shhh lifted dirt

was all the loud we’d need  that day. 

That with a saved shovel. 

No gloves.  The blond, almost white

soft hard handle laid next to

the blond almost white soft hard

box of ash.  It could’ve been almost

comical if it wasn’t.  Recovered

from a fire to dig after a fire.  Imagine

the tools we save thinking

some day we’ll need, some day

even just touching, after all

those years using, all those years

fallow, all the fires and demolitions

and severed hands and hills to climb

and shit to shovel

and holes to dig.  Imagine. 

We touch it and it’s almost,

even in December, alive, almost

ready to pull in a lung of warm

dusty air and sigh.

January 6th: Soothing an Old Wound

January 6th: Soothing an Old Wound

But snow…

has no melody or form, it

is as though all the tears of all

the lost souls rose to heaven

and were finally heard and blessed…

and given their choice chose then

to return to earth, to lay their

great pale cheek against the burning

cheek of earth and say, There, there, child.

                                                                                Philip Levine

                                                                                Snow

frankly, curtains keep

out the cold, at least enough

that the weight of still dark

morning, when the wind’s finally died

doesn’t press against

the glass with its wavy face

and say Please?  I’ll make it

as much like May as I can.

I’ve had lovers like this.  One

in particular who’d coax

and cajole.  Who’d grope

the hem of my skirt.  Creep

up, distract.  It’s remarkable

how much then I couldn’t feel,

from my neck to my knee,

I mean it’s not all that far,

and the difference between

his breath and his hand.  I was

too ugly I suppose.  Too

young.  It’s surprising how I saw it

all coming and I did nothing

to stop it--not even asking

to get off.  The resolve to stay

the course and take the wind

the way a defeated, even before he

enters the ring, boxer does,

round after round, going down

bloody.  The concussion’s enough

even the word fuck

sounds like love.  Especially

fuck.  And for years

that’s enough.  Years.  Even

when the building starts

to crumple under the weight

of my own offspring, those mouths

and bones no one would recognize

from the road, birds who never flew

the coop.  The roof, look,

it sags with them.  How it lasted

that long is your guess.  A colony

of mutes on their bum.  Leprosy
of the tongue.

It would be too sentimental, too

predictable to say the laying of hands

happened at just the right time.

It wasn’t like that.   Instead

it was just not showing up.  I don’t

even remember why.  And by the time

I left I was like any other bag

of maintenance rags.  A closet of mop

heads. 

All that careful planning.  Listen,

before I felt that breath on my neck

I was a going to mass and catechism

kinda baby.  I thought it was amour

enough.  But listen--theology like that

is the head of a newborn, how her

cranium is a tiny tectonic plate--

how its spongy self compresses

to push enough though an opening

so tight pure bone would be broke by
it.

And listen: she comes with blood

and screaming.  She comes unprepared.

She comes into any hands that can

catch her.  It is like this.  It is exactly

like this.  And the wind.  Listen still:

the wind is pressing its cheek

against the pain now.  Feel it?  Early

January.  You’ve opened the window. 

So have I.  I can’t complain--I’ve already

been born.  What’s left, I mean really,

tell me, what is there left to lose?

January 7th: On the Barn Roof With a Boy

On The Barn Roof With a Boy

You know, I don’t remember

how we got there, the top

of the barn roof, but I remember

jumping off into what was

soft and tall, heads and humps

of green and gold grass out near

where we’d stake our cow.

Time after time we’d climb

                (to be honest it was a small

                barn, two stalls and a crawl

                space really for a ten hen

                coop)

Climb sit stand elbow jump

climb sit stand elbow jump

and there was this one boy I wanted

to impress but only so he wouldn’t

think I was like every other girl

on that roof.  I liked thinking he was

my friend, like I was bad enough

for him, boy enough to jump.

Thinking back now though, I have

to say it was such a small barn, it was

nothing to jump from there.  Too small

to even keep hay in.  In winter I’d see

my father knock bale after bale

against his knee from the shed

attic to the barn, after he’d shovel

a long straight path to the door.  And

how opening it a roll of warm air

would hover at his hips.  And that attic,

though never that warm, and more often

empty than full or half, was my favorite

piece of dusty sun or moon, even in winter,

                (though that barn roof in winter

                was a different jump, up sometimes

                to beneath my arms depending

                on the drifts, and always soft.)

Maybe because there were stairs

and a sure way to get there

and it was quiet and away from down

stairs and the house I never could entirely

breathe in.  And one night it was quiet

enough to hold hands, just hold hands,

with a boy I had a crush on, a boy

my age, while his father and my father

talked about guns and drank Seagrams 7

& water and we were under the roof

in winter and our feet at the end

of our legs hung out over the stairs.

And they seemed unhinged, unblooded.

But our hands were warm.  I remember

saying we could never jump from here,

we’d only break our legs and what good

would that do

and we didn’t cry but we might have

if the night were long enough for us

if the whiskey held out,

after our fathers bought and sold

the only guns they loved running up

the barrel with, their oiled cloth

soft, a lowing in their throat,

a sound I’d come to know only

years later under the hands of a man

who knew about the pitch of roofs how

steep they need to be to keep up

winter after winter and he’d trace his finger

down my spine and turn me over

belly down and lift my hips and say

this pitch, yes this is the proper pitch.

I was young too young under the eves

of his skin.  I was easy to jump off.  I thought

again and again of that barn

while he climbed on, how brave I felt

knowing that tuff boy was watching me

back then all the while I lunged up and down

eight ten feet maybe, landing feet first,

into the hum and sting through my skin

and into my bones my hips my throat

the stomach stun hovering …

And I told him after he was done the first time

about the boy and me in the cold

in the empty attic how he kissed me

though today I don’t remember anything

about that kiss.  I’ll tell you what I do

remember though:  the smell of gun oil.

the sound of boots on stairs.  The come down

from there right now what do you think

you’re doing. 

We weren’t doing anything but holding

hands. 

I see his dark head, that gentle boy, a

silhouette against the window, closed

for the coming snow, and how I know

I know without question, if we were

high enough, when we heard those steps

on steps, smelled that oil, we both, still

holding hands, would have jumped.

January 5th: Thinking About Peonies

January 5^th:

Thinking About Peonies

It’s the fifth of January.  Is it

too soon to be thinking about peonies

and the May grace of rain?

Is it too soon to think

the work of ants on the globe

of one wet bud, a duty of morning

and drops of water that all through

to March have been under

that old tricycle beneath the maple

and when a surge of warm

wind and a blessing of melt and fudge

mud and up somehow in a way

we cannot see, the evaporating.  To think

it’s been there nearly all winter long:

this drop of water on the top and then

slowly the bottom of this getting

toward bottom heavy flower.  I’ve noticed

that some don’t open at all--imagine:

the winter weight of drifts, snow, old

leaves, and mulch from some levy

break damage and mad slide down river

Mississippi, caught and hauled to dry

to be chipped and shipped up to browse

the rest of its broken life on top

of a pile of peonies--and these flowers:

under pressure, push up come spring

after all--yes after all.  The winter here,

let me tell you, I think it hasn’t even started

yet.  The snow’s packed and heavy,

it opens and closes like a set of lungs

we would never think to consider: inhaling

through to April, holding it all in. 

No wonder we keep our head down. 

Or at least I do.  Until I tire of it, and then

I’ll push myself after moving the two

feet of snow that’s fallen, after I’ve dug

out enough to get to the post office

and back in the sleet and the coming blizzard

I’ll look up at that section of the fence

and ask is it too early, thinking about peonies?

what's left of snow is winter in the crotch of a tree

what’s left of snow

is winter in the crotch

of a tree

sitting this one out

I’d say maybe till April

or even May

this deep in the woods

yes, maybe till late

April

yes, it’d have to

this deep to be cold enough

in a snow

I’ve walked up to my knees

in 

a snow like this, yes

to my knees

and then hips

to sit

like a brand new stone

Buddha

thinking maybe the second coming

is something

like this:

maybe God withdraws

the gravity

that’s it--just

pulls up stakes

the same way a man

goes in toward the dam

on Kimbal Hill

looking for his trap line

or  rides a mile off

Wallace Cove

to haul in the green

urchin covered lobster traps

poison balls like steroid sucking

barnacles they crawl

and smooch and hiss

bubbles in the gunwale

of the boat like they don’t

know air.  I’ve watched

my father brush them

away almost

unnoticing, his thick blue

gloves his own holy

rubber poison proof

vest, just brush them off

like his old dog maybe,

the one he shot

near the corner

of the old Wood’s road

and a something

I don’t know what

but a something comes

up to that dog to

lift his jaw just one more

time to look into the sky

maybe or my father’s eyes

and it’s nothing

anybody can see it’s just,

listen, there’s no intention

even though the poor bastard’s

groping for a hold on the road

like he’ll never know how

to hang on to anything again

he’s maybe feeling like

this is the first time

he’s ever hit me

and

unwounding into the dead

leaves and everything else

that’s laid down here

buried beneath him

he sucks hard on those twin

straw nostrils and smells

brimstone, smells removal

smells what’s going out

of something valuable

but shit

he’s just a dog

he can’t name it

doesn’t even need to

just, you know, right there

below the shoulder

he feels it start to give,

massaging his ribs,

getting in without a key

or even needing one

and holding on

while what’s tipping

the world over

gives itself a little breather

before clearing out

altogether, petting

the dead dog on the head

covering him with leaves

by his favorite tree

and the old chasing stick 

to mark him by or

resetting the trap

with fresh bait and setting it--buoy

bouncing bouncing foam

floats the only ever

knowing there’s something

down below there but what

and how much or maybe nothing

at all it won’t say

not can’t but won’t

only in the hands holding

the rope will it speak

and then, even then---

I mean come on

something’s pulling the tongue

into the ground

like an exhausted dog

something sinks

even when God comes

and pulls up steaks.