SNAILS OF THE APOCALYPSE

Martha Zweig

POB 1038 Hardwick, Vermont 05843-1038

802-472-5472

[email protected] CONTENTS

I intimates

Charm Before Sleeping Futurity Mothers’ Day Gamma Egg on Memorial Day Mystery Package Hearse Precipitations Olfactory Cues Troth He Recollects Her Finery But I Digress Cove, Swells Finale Minna Bottom Mise en Scene

II neighborhoods

Deer Visit Alice Apocryphal Forecast Pearly Everlasting Holiday Community Help-Yourself Petit Mal My Debt to Society A Mechanical Bank Dubious Provenance Paradise I Wake Up Without a Navel Undersong All Hell

III word processing

Triphyllum Impulse Dysfluencies Afterspat Bill-&-Coo Anathema Beauty Sleep Fever Blessing Big Bang Séance Ghazal But No Hinterland Not About You Beyond Me All the Precedents, in Order Ice Out

IV snake & snail

Burn The Breakfast Nook Against Consolation Mutt Mix Taint

Waterskin Reincarnal Zombie Jamboree Task Force Advance Directive

I intimates CHARM BEFORE SLEEPING

You are of my species against the ocean’s inroads upon the ringed kingdom of recognition: among all mixed daily things I know you.

Whatever the dreams do, may the constant bodily keeping involving us now within the waking coincidence maintain us nearby, while we and all who have held tight relax to sleep, and through these hours, difficult to remember, when death will undo each double helix and comb the loose strands, like the sea. FUTURITY

Numeral round to numeral round- &-round our sundial ants tug time. Tiny harnesses of light. At night at various variances the stars & moon hitch up the Four Snails of the Apocalypse, but you-- for you, little jockey, I slide up & buckle the two purple stirrups you’ll perch to break the gate & hurl out fluttering silks

(o my favorite!) onto urgency’s whipping track: already latterdays’ lost tuck the far turn in a shuffle of dust. MOTHERS' DAY

Willynilly, mama's cottoncandy baby boy, floss flesh spins on a spine & just now such a sourpuss, do fuss less, yes?

Dreambasket & bobbling to uppity whitecapped & lilypaddled lake traffic lilting off from loon to leggy heron & back to a skit of raccoon, mama's puttering one of her annual half-past two o'clock picnics luckily you'll settle to nap through just as I now nuzzle you to for my pretty refreshment's sake at the nick of my visitor, vinegar mother of mine seeped up exactly on time from her puckering grave.

She'll linger; I'll primp her wisps again. We'll sip wine. GAMMA EGG ON MEMORIAL DAY

Take me for a floribunda-headed tuft! The hat’s a formality one unsupervised mirror, knowing no better, picked out for me; alas, rash millinery, but might’ve turned me out even more unbecomingly among the cemetery decor, half plastic & spattered, the whole famdamnily outing indignant over its hour-&-a- half already behind a schedule. Thanks to me, also, refreshments I promised & made & mustn’t I know I set right here, it was checkered linen in russet wicker.

Private graces: I bless to such grandbabies as these of mine & worldwide the paradisiacal islands of the pancreas & all the kindly endocrines, whose penitential cells seep, sweet, even in sleep careless sleep & likewise all the waking hours I keep love at it, lub-dub. The heart unskilled like a fist, squishing the love along to distribute among the subtlest capillaries to nourish cell bulbs originating the grandbabies’ eyelashes, even.

Why do you live with us, Gamma Egg? You know, I was off on a way, the way, my own, the one I like to get, the one you always seem to, & just then because of the exprovising implosive devices, the loving astray. MYSTERY PACKAGE

You get it-- right now-- surprise! Peel up the blue sky apparent at the bottom of a pavement puddle & there appears your career in outer space. Or, when you crank open their can, the worms’ delighted expressions.

World without end or means: swept up, & the museum of dark matter closed, as if merely for renovations. Map- dancing bees circumvent the rotunda & zag away to their hexagon complex, experts as to locality, as if lost souls’ applause compelled them encore home. Unpack your basket. Wrapped in someone’s houndstooth-checkered- past napkin, the nasty booby-trapping war that shook over your son returns him. HEARSE

after William Blake

Oops, hit the skid rind, cruel world slipped a corkscrewy peel of it’s-about-time.

Spirits high, royalty flung itself wide open upon its own unhinges & by a splinter of chance that night I rose, my first foot received into a golden glassyeyed slingback pump, slick as princeling himself & the moon by its half & half- again measures recalculating what brass tarnish or shine he & his might take to me & mine.

Heels, toes, how didn’t both poor stepsisters flail tipsy & lose their balances, bloody-shod & blind!

Remember the cornfield listening?-- nick of the worm in the rolypoly pumpkin’s undercarriage?

Sooner or later a watched wedding boils. PRECIPITATIONS

1.

Maple branches hauled the clogged snow fourteen miles away, seventeen miles return to shrug more of the same snow off onto the porch steps. The steps tiptoed around the downspout corner to where the lilac to this day doesn’t recall. Try to compel it, it won’t. Seems I can’t distinguish an upending of grief from its lowdowning.

2.

Refrain, bass thump I worked up from underneath & into a neighboring dog’s whine, scours my ears.

April: already a week’s leftover clouds spoil in the sink & the sky wrings its rag of sour rain ping-ping down into a speckled pan on the ground. The other pan, shiny one I could see a face in, scorched-- as Sir Armadillo, knight in armor, rusts, husk of himself, steel wool argyle vest I knitted him into.

3.

Unexpectedly clad as hail, surprise, it’s you! --rare one, outlandish, hippity hopping-mad in the dooryard, ridiculous momentary tantrum, all the peonies battered flat & then in exhaustion you break into silly sunburst & rainbow, innocent crunch of you underfoot, sobbing & soon led off in plastic fisticuffs.

My desk planner enters, for tomorrow, Not today! & lists in logical order aspects of a complicated errand.

4.

Months’ drudgery turning over & inside- & rightside- out leaf after leaf, but tonight I rustle out gorgeous: supermodel the runway queen in strut, cocked neck snapping a tangled curl across my sneer, svelte all the way home in chilly gooseflesh stomping poppop-zip through the last clutch of photographers.

Season’s sensation: ballooning midnight-blueblack gown, its quick switches & tucks of fog, a la mode, all the rage.

OLFACTORY CUES

That’ll be that bum raccoon pair now, rumble my dumpster! All-hours backwoods masque, Soldier-of- Fortune loves Prima Donna for the little ways her fingers do fishheads & for the inquisition she permits her tongue. For my part, I pick over best in speckled foxgloves: see my ad in Odds- ‘n’-Ends, apparent weekly starting next best vexed issue. Take, for my own good, care. Sniff what mustier yet bouquet foments: this morning’s oeuvre stars me fumigating in flying colors such lingerie, table linens & lingering sheets as string along the patio, even as in aerosol I next brush up my static-blue bouffant, incorporating what flattering lights these rosy windows glance off mirrors even as I miss my image in them terribly. Did I mean to revisit romantic indiscretion, the spiced bower? Trellis, sundial, trippingly the ardent letter stashed ashen under the (which one?) flagstone? Today the day & this the very stricken hour I’m positive we set? More mere animal racket, though, & persistent stink: varmints taking liberties upon my (I admit it) riches of embarrassment, hot toxics of carnal conversation. Love of my life, I ramble on. Soupcon in the air of a ghost some orderly somewhere unwinds out of old gauze bagged in biohazard. I remember my lips swelled & bled. Bruised over the pelvis, I staggered. I could fuck a stone-cold stone rock, I thought, if it were he, if he pressed his nostrils into me. TROTH

As surely as eleven Eastern gray squirrels twirl twigs roundabout the parade grounds, I love you & lash my leaves too.

Yay! until very God Herself appears slinky in sequins & in full diatribe roaring No way! will I assuredly love you.

As yours-truly as new flotsam floats & fresh jetsam hurls upon high seas-swollen rollicking residue, I, too, crest in whitecaps of love among such two-by-twos as grapple one or another sloshed off of No’s foundering ark, & as verily

I buzz as does the hive of hexagonized love that survives every flower to flatter & fatten its Queen of stings’ sweet dream.

If I crouch latterly scratching a frosty window’s opaque fleurs- de-lys to elaborate love’s ill-gotten pains, if I’ve caught on to your quickstep just then double-crossing our spin-- why, I’ll be that liar luckily nobody listens to; I’ll be the nevermind-who, whose only love you’ll be nonetheless, poor irregardless you. HE RECOLLECTS HER FINERY

I’d just about sweet-talked closing time into home-to-my-love when its very last moment stumbled clumsily upon, ah, the true me. O dear, o dear.

Such-as-it-is was my sad shape. What sad hands must’ve dug the slick gray clay clods of me once from a drum? Slapped-on, then, & thumbing me through successive misdisfigurements, as against what innocent armature formerly tingling shyly to what high promise, witticism & incipient flesh tones?

Look what the cat dragged in & drops & purrs to, sniffs it & seizes it up & trots on ahead, repeating at each threshold. All in my honor, a long scatter of plumage. BUT I DIGRESS

Off, next, to groceries after traffic court, I crossed your mind, the scenic route, those flocks clogging the shoulders, their yearlings trotting out heedless to nose their fascinating four convex hubcap-reflected distortions, for you remain irresistible.

Patience! I reconsider again as again revolves, a pinwheel in breezes, weathercock’s clutch at its peak pitch of alert. I will roll down my window & roll over the thistle ditch; I will roller down the coastering clear to yesteryear, when I rolled my eyes--

O foolishness, o motley occasion! -- I shied at the flag-flappering blue July sky’s rodeo buckings & bolts, I endured what embarrassments of itch & riches? Fat chance those two’ll catch on, I heard a gentler lady nudge into her kinder sir, behindhand, in a confidence. COVE, SWELLS

Seaside birdcall: profiteer, profiteer! keeps me irritant company. As middle-distant salt waters lift, I’ll tilt a beaujolais & toast to bony appetite-- to all those abroad said to starve-- yet even as yonder cruise vessels tipsy in festivity offset the sun (itself pasha upon its incandescent poufs of cloud), any horizon I manage to keep an eye on helplessly seasickens me.

Can’t pinch what time is it now? greedily enough. Ancient imperial ships, chests stuffed to their distended hasps with wrought gold rummage & coin, all those that shivered & sank shook from their loosening ribs never loot enough to redeem even what infinitesimal millisecond ago just swooped by seizing its nip of my speed-of-night jittery late light.

The drowning sailors’ senses of humor passed. If I get up to cross a room my head swims

& oof, a single lugubrious great blue heron drops out of deadwood & slowly moseys off the lowdown air. I believe it was when?-- backsliding years & continents -- a moose circled around and around its own brain worm.

Stay me again against the sand pillars! -- I, to my confusion, who muttered once against what an uproarious world O no! --not yet another squall! then later came to acknowledge the feral ocean, however vigorous the continual urgings of its surf, mostly flat. FINALE

When in doubt, do mischief. When it hurts, it will let you know. Follow the gleam in the eye of the needle into the haystack, into mouse & its mite, slow hottening heart of combustion.

Come prowl. Lest we forget how keenly we loved, how long, help me inveigle our best & worst angels into new knots of invention, ours alone who recall such havoc we wrought & so proud --back in the day-- that the sun rolled up gales of laughter into furious clouds, low ocean preening itself a cleanly silence over the drowned out loud. MINNA

Even as you forget me more, so little else crowds in. As you forget, oh, everything, item by tidbit, I can’t begin to recall what I did either with my own dead. How to not-catch never a glimpse at the no window?

Welcome myself to the cellar. Lush cobwebs shimmering in festivity will do for a mind and the occasional furnace huff will do for the mind’s pride. Virtuous old tools & blunt eccentric might-come-in-handys nuzzle my touch at first but not after the time-- once too many-- my manners omit to compliment the housekeeping the small meticulous vermin do. Thereafter, slights & shrugs now of negligence, & you --who were dear to me, who settled my fingers in fine dust-- flick irritably away. BOTTOM

You’ll be among the first to know. You will. You’ll see: waddling like an emperor’s obesity ahead of you, sunrise, the future.

In due time too little & too late engage to marry. So shy, this pair; so much the better to snuggle & groom each other-- foster foundlings mutually taken-in.

And how will the years yet make me do without a body? Not now, not for nothing, not at all, absent its rods & cones, its propulsives & obdurates, absent its membrane drums?

This too will end in tears. Squalls hurling the timber snags, rips & chokes awash crashing immense sobbing boulders: brown rivers lurch upon them & where does it end? Down where? Down here. MISE EN SCENE

Gardens ago, overrun as they were then with creatures dangling among limbs’ fruits & weathering leaves, a feather boa swooned in love with an elephant’s elegant trunk. The two of them singsang. A scrim of rain passed, twinkling the trees.

Throbbing lightly strangleheld, each one’s muscle wound the other’s workaday knot. Night prospered overhead & throughout plump heaven the constellations hummed in their struts, twangling fresh foam toppling the oceans below: slid off, gushed up.

Bit-cast now in the clown troupe, ostriches at hopscotch, we flounce & skip stricken cities’ empty grids, towers’ ruins’ & tipsy scaffolds’ shadows’ diamondback-&-giraffish reticulations hung in curtains of dust: dress-rehearsing this latest great extinction’s brute obstinate opera. II neighborhoods DEER VISIT

Early, two does find their way through oak scrub & vines almost to the stony edge: tufts, surf bluff. Brown flanks brush some big berries loose that they don’t notice. It’s a new place; in it they resemble each other so anything watching can’t quite pick which one.

This is the closest they come to the ocean of business, its waves rattling through pebbles & vacant shells, but most of their lives its dickering just reaches them even inland after they’ve stepped back. The herd gets good luck, browse enough all winter, six promising fawns. ALICE APOCRYPHAL

White scuts flare up & exit, burrows-by- Escher undermining the buttercup meadow so next moment I wrench a maidenly ankle & stumble only to get myself mauled malleable to the entire collective. Fresh captive to busybodied ingenious Tribe Fetterfoot! --adopted, tutored into their gentleservice. Deportments that once became me, switching off my last wisp & eyelash, leap away to the ladylikening limbs & lives of my sisters who’ll do our lineage proud.

Lengthening my absence, goodbye again, goodbye! Whip-smartly as I’d recite our father’s maxims & spin our mother’s variants, I knew everyone knew I’d wed into a stranger story & introduce the first of a beg-to-differing brood under cabbage leaves. FORECAST

Groundhog Day, think spring! I hip-hop higher the snowbanks, even as the crocodiles of elsewhere flex one nostril among themselves & consider another.

Surely one thing follows another on great brute feet as toes follow fingers to count for something, & here you’re a girl amounting almost to twenty

& soon enough to start to sour forever, but not yet. I’ve got your shadow you don’t see covered with mine you do. Be not afraid. I’m telling you the dynasties of dinosaurs who summered along into the Cretaceous a while before they liquefied feared one another most, & likewise we fear the careers our own fellows bully us out of & into-- but today we summon to honor this marmot, very rodent of timidity, harmless himself & mistaken, o mistaken, poor thing: scrambling back out of sunshine, our sorry celebrity. PEARLY EVERLASTING

Summer: visitors: the lake is not amused. It edges its way around picking up whatever it cares to keep of its liberties, then back into its remotest cove it sulks. It will try to drown somebody one day. Me?

Just a lake’s luck-- I shake out my aluminum chair into its shallows & proceed to occupy. Suzerain for the sunny hour! Of the three chapters I read, none disappoints. My feet prune. Love does that too, crinkles the nervous system.

Giddyup wind can seize a lake by the nape by force, never yet vice-versa. Lumpy gusts, hustle off, leave me alone.

Nowadays children skip a lake altogether, scatter off fingering tiny devices. Only my own child I miss; in truth just a little.

Whoever any one of us was, I dare you to show up: bright, early, the last time I’ll get taken by surprise--

The lake lifts its look askance. I’ve been grousing too much. Tomorrow morning I wake up myself again & with a girlish skinned knee, sticky-seeping. HOLIDAY

Not likely to die today, hooray, for we woke together robust & zesty, & weather’s too fine today for any death, especially mine,

& the empire we detest champions us collaterally in its every negligent brushoff of plump golden crumbs--

Not today! -- butterfly whirligigs flutter as flags squeak up their poles as the scales of justice this way & that tilt to hummingbirds’ sips at the syrupy pans,

& so shall we sup our friends: silver plinth & tray of devilish eggs, a glossy lobster, herbed ox hanging its sliced tongue out, o clove- studded fist of ham. COMMUNITY HELP-YOURSELF ballyhoos its seasonal potluck: I curdle my famous nothing whatsoever in zilch, with freeze-dried naughts of the naughty boy the dog mauled, vandal of mailbox & four garden gnomes; sprinkle on bits of his grated knuckles & thumbs.

Zeroing in from miles around, fellowships of the hot buttered crock pots, latticed & crimped cherry crusts, pettybickers in custard & snubs-- of whose apparently marshmallow flop shall I not partake but flinch with its spatula?

Limp & lumpy, alas the leftovers later that nobody takes home-- except a few of the gnomes might, then do, nudging their baskets & bins along, tucking the tinfoil upon our torn-asunder loaves & split fishes: our first apple’s inexhaustible brown core. PETIT MAL

Dire symptom, to wake up in a headache, plus I forget what it’s of. Afflictions’ placebos rev & throb down neural runaways whose fancy flights collide: let the airport owls win one. Empires away, let the ragtag militants win one.

Or my nerves keen for a cigarette. I’d pinch it in half, or some passerby’s castoff goodsize butt. Distract: o rememberize to me my first truelove, the one not you, but I hasten I do truelove you too-- ever a next angelic & silkish razzledazzle about, as if each brushoff-my- shoulder might shrug itself into a wing. As a scatter of barley summons insipid soup to its next ingredient, so kicks-in in-this-moment’s flashmob & whoops along snarling a traffic of orange flagpersons at play.

MY DEBT TO SOCIETY

droops defaultish at mortifyingly low interest. Not one Street wizard will bundle its worth amongst his sorriest securities. Morning shower & wince: my own steamiest mirror-image aches with ennui.

Have I bottomed-out? Truly I too once hopped smart to the fire-in-the-belly, then heartburn & hiccups among the begrudges, occasional ethical upchuck--

Shop sign: “Refurbisher of Zeal,” that wormy small proprietor we patronize: Sacre bleu! & as if strenuous oceanic waters slapped delta mud-flat zombie bodies awake-- shiver, drip & hoist up the rest of our lives: wives- slash-hubbies, sacks, cats & kits all abandon St. Ives. Dame Nursery, she who blandished & outwitted us this far, reveals hers as the face of the real world made up entirely of apparitions. Boo: can I spook any actual thing before the corner ahead whips it around? They say a day comes I’ll not be heard of again, which I might miss getting notified in the din. A MECHANICAL BANK

Nobody sees us. A little minute we’ll sit, less than a rust crust on a thin tin whistle pilfered behind a corner as local yesterweathers taught us: snow. We know now how who kept the crippling fingers & toes alive in long-gone-blind lace stitches or crewel, hems, haws, rag hanks and as well my personal braids once-upon-then under locket & links. Pearlish clusters too that snapped at my pink ears & spit curls.

Just so may sister & sister hoist into an afternoon our own rumpled shadows, prod them to posture; permission too for a squint: adjoining the harlequin parlor, my cupboard squirrel with its cheeks stuffed plump, its tail that curled & jerked

& worked as if its boss poked it its daily quota & rate but no, it was I, shrewd one: saving, saving. DUBIOUS PROVENANCE

Shoddy story about the broken artifactual dog, how it got broken. Whichever detail one of us improvises another impugns.

Stove shouldering its surly pot of beef heart.

Glowing human half-lives decayed room-to-room at their majestic rate. Our things bestirred themselves largely to slight one another, though all taken together did manage to average out & farther out entering into spindrift.

Patter of little feet, stalker I never can shake, rerun of the whole infanticide however I labor, heave, & pant push push my way oof ah back inside the baby.

All morning mother hissed, wouldn’t be touched, not once, not ever again. She crouched the corner in her shit britches & aged.

Turn of a cheek testifies. Likewise I still believe the lying eyes glowering-- out of that one tin mirror we used to share-- steadily at the imposter.

PARADISE

I stood security the first six weeks. Nobody minded the moon. The sun you could reason with. Other weathers, otherwise.

We smuggled a tunnel whole into the withering mountain: a gut, an intubation, fed it along length by strenuous length. Now & then it kinked & squirmed. The mountain bristled hackles.

A few of us ran out of the same time a few of us ran into: collisions, versions & revisions of the vanishing act.

Before, since, I never scrambled so from fear. The only camouflage is to lick oneself newborn, covered with hide in the first place. I WAKE UP WITHOUT A NAVEL

Oily, skidding, I haul hand-over- hand a cold cable into the dark.

Checkpoint: procedure: half-flashlit officer insinuates part of a facial expression & sketches me a scrap of map to a next map.

Surely I squirm inside the mortal peristalsis: the great snake has seized me! Randy, deliver me from the gravity certain to open straight down & on down to the underworld eternally as busy as it is, she-fiend directing the traffic, block-&-tackle, bulky contraband offloading, empty soul winched thud upon empty soul.

Divert me to your house, the poultry church, where for instance a hurt hen recuperates in the bathtub. After visiting the hen I dream

I reached underneath my mother once, & she never missed the rest of my life I took.

UNDERSONG

Dawn: eight street bullies congregate spoiling to tweak a perfect day. They stalk tinfoil glints in the gutter & dangle dead moles.

Arise & go to Innisfree, wattles & daubs! Poetical lovers there surround one another & bristle like bees busybodying thistles. How, here, come we to sip, from mother’s exquisitest china pattern, our chipped tea? Trivial effronteries scrimping a latest grisly luncheon along?

But the day advances pleasantly. Children scatter to hopscotch back & forth & from pebbles to butterscotch. Giddy moment: I myself recompile my list of lost lists as if it dipped to the breeze & whispered all of its nothings & negligence along my collarbones.

The bullies rumble & puff. They’ve busted everything to bits. Actually we ran home wailing hours ago. The perfect day stretches itself out, slackens, curls up, doubles over & over the bullies, snuggles & licks their scabby elbows & moon faces to glisten. ALL HELL

chiseled its latch & broke loose. You’d think we’d never heard tell of hissy niggling doom at clockstrike, end near of our lives as we knew them, end of each of our strange-to-the-other’s waking moments at daylight’s mirror even as we dripped what latest rinse we stepped from, flushed all too abashedly both nude. Now a similar lookingglass trembles a pink goosefleshly self as if supposed to be mine alone & to let me never again mistake myself for spit, image or fractal iteration of who else’s what next. Meanwhile you howl outrage from among your fellow dead you can’t seem to get used to. Your new cohort, your neighborhood. Settle in, why (didn’t I?) don’t you. III word processing TRIPHYLLUM IMPULSE

Sorry but spring will always interrupt. Look by the brook: greenish-white & greenish-purple bully pulpits rise, each hoodie tipped spathe over spadix.

Who hasn’t cupped a hand once, twice, exactly so over some stunned chipmunk, or a bird? It didn’t do any good. First it did no harm. The creature shook.

I’ll allow I grumble too sour by now in my own tongue, but here’s Jack, stalwart out of hidden flowers borne upstanding: for each pumping wound in each morning’s elsewhere imperial massacre, each insult in wreckage, won’t he speak up? DYS/FLUENCIES

The frog in the throat is language. The prince chokes up. Love always wants to croon, grunts the frog.

Press sources’ forky tongues slither in slick & slug out blind. Around & through the gag orders’ vowels a morning edition puts to bed muttering never to take their word for it-- jargons, gorgons, magmas & fumaroles, hot mud pots blubbering up.

Two weeks along, the riverbank garbles with geese. Tongue-tied the boy & tongue- twisted the girl drive one another around the bend with crazy talk.

Fiery bush: the Hebrew alphabet’s letters writhe & jitter alive, antic to infiltrate & thus to extricate themselves & one another from sense & nonsense.

This-&-that, a tossup, Frank’s furter split slathered with Marion’s herbal verbal crisp & dicey mimsy-dressed & slithy tove relish.

Vague aide riffles in passing the library’s Unabridged & 195,000 more-or-less words see light of day. Not to eye or tongue or mind do they subside revealed.

Two speak more than two different languages. He gives her his word, she gives him hers; they plight lifelong & lively misunderstanding.

I’m the shrimp whisperer. Tell me something I don’t know. I settle into an area of crustacea stirring & kneel.

AFTERSPAT

Girl, you must’ve mistook the man’s odd moment’s woolgathering gloom for more like six hours’ weather stricken mortally ill over an entire collapsing sky! Incipient- looking tornado deteriorated to small & soggy hail, you might as well step on out now, front yard of a mind making-up sunshine-blue out of whole silky clothes, scants of blush touching the high bones, getting the likelier look of him. Takes him his one kiss to flip the apologetics. Bless a daddy’s limp little stub (he says), or You be my funny crutch instead, or You be my dynamite stump, stumble downhill to the gravel pit where the bashed old red Chevy tips & tell it to the porcupine-- girl, girl,

& he’ll come along & tell too. He’ll rhyme & rustle quills telling it back to you. BILL & COO

Poor pre-ex lovers haven’t quite tucked their cotton- candy vendetta away in carnival time as even they might’ve managed back home in drawer space, rolling it up inside itself like dried socks. Ergo they court & divert each other’s malign ingenuity in reciprocal vice-versa. What’s that? --missing in auction action a heartbeat behind them? --there! just past the merry-go-going going & gone struck down to the first bewildered passerby who, of some other mind entirely, swatted the buzzing air of recriminant rumor & tale, why, it’s the pool cue. the musical chair. Buddy’s beagle. -- no: Adorable Dora the bureau doll remember we won at the foul fair. You dropped me in the frydaddy slick she winds herself up & whines. ANATHEMA ANATHEMA ANATHEMAANATHEMA

You what? You put Pepperjack the cat to sleep? He slept just fine & he hated without euphemism. I list being-you first among your outrages, I seethe.

In your own pitted boiled baggage pack yourself. Strap fast, lock knuckles, & be found or not among the years tumbling slowly down around the carousels

of Gehenna of Baal, where only departures arrive, where concourses run beyond all alphabets & I reassign your gates beyond number. BEAUTY SLEEP

Kwitcher bitchin, dad snorted. Shut yer yap up. I hated the salt stinging my cheeks, it curdled my sass.

Little blue gas flames itched in the kitchen. A pudding fumed, the better to set. Pulpy crushed gripes folded in.

Bard: the excellent thing in a woman’s her stifled voice. Her boa: sleek silken throat gag.

Bard again: Shake not thy gory locks under this roof over your head. A spindle, a lucky spell, my pricked tingling finger. FEVER BLESSING

maggot: archaic, a whimsical fancy

Short work a day’s malaise has made of me! Thus far I body forth what you see before you: crank of sickbed arts, toilet articles, nighttable tumbler of ice, a black cracker, white-hot bulb peeping from under its ruched shade, irritable minority of which? (or another?) one bookish hallucination I might pick.

You at the doorknob. Burglar of practical whereabouts & scenarios. Must I look a sight? Grown into my room like the tight sleep daddy wished his favorite girl, with window leaves & the long lobes of light the cars hurled bungling along the walls as they passed out of the neighborhood & beyond ken-- you, there, bidden intruder, signatory in & out of my body’s modest down-to-earthly log, boost me into the chilly stirrup whose horse, too big for me to see, too strenuous to hold, bolts off in a shudder of hide to the high screes rumpling their rodents & pinched herbs into rime crystals & glare, where the archaic maggots squirm my pupils until my stone skull sutures fault to fracture in figments of speech running me ragged to ricochet & then by tomorrow morning they switch, drop me to bed alive, damp & muttering probably still my beady numbers & sorrow, nevertheless bones reknit & chuckling over their pink marrow. BIG BANG

Evidence departs from the truth with a vengeance. Flash of its tail & thither the starry hills, theoretical wrangling making much too much of What’s the matter with you? even as You gonna make something of it? carps continually. A struck light staggers: first feats of induction.

Should’ve stayed a factory girl: all day long bundling nerves. Quitting time rolls around. Neighboring hairdo, crackling static, oscillates tattle & stigma out past Alpha Centauri, biddy’s itchy need-to-know basis. My own personal business goes without saying: O dark matter, why can’t we get it together, punch out the boss clock?

Pulses shimmered through Aladdin’s dreamy human eyelids exiting tip by tip each humid lash by lash into ambient night. His fictive heart lub-dubbed. Rub up my tarnish, rub me raw & I'll flesh you out your proposition, softly whistles my own bedside lamp-that-looks-like-a-teapot’s resident genius.

I can’t help it, I shake myself frenetically just like your duck- hunting dad’s sopping retriever, hence repulsive galaxies afling in all directions, explains away the Original Conniption Fit. Thanks for asking but I must be off. Nothing doing! -- its thankless job, doing its best & worst; nothing less than little more than suspense killing me first. SEANCE

Mother collapsed & sank of the vapors: miasma, my nephwhew, bird flu, boo who.

I wouldn’t if I were you, kin clasping around the cluttery table one by one weighed in. Believe me, I’d almost anything else. But then again.

You can tell somebody must’ve suffered the little children, long wandered off from their home bodies & bodies too long gone. A time they were once upon, or just in a nick of, time runny out of its loose ends but by after-all it appeared merely our common neighborly craterface moon, on this particular evening phasing out.

Two secrets overheard confiding themselves into each other’s ear: Don’t breathe to anyone or I’ll die. Of course you will.

Of course you are.

You’re up to something. Every day I almost catch you utterly engrossed everywhere. GHAZAL

Six nomads’ nightmare dogs overheard the wounded gazelle’s cry. An airy vibration sprung the herd -- the wounded gazelle’s cry.

Selected clergy inaugurate a new President. His private demons administered the wounded gazelle’s cry.

Symptoms dire, what intricate trinket might distract our mother? She attended, as if she mattered, the wounded gazelle’s cry.

I apologize. I renounce you. We weren’t meant to be. In truth I always knew I preferred the wounded gazelle’s cry.

Heads, pelts, horns upon tusks, rich men mount their animal spirits. Their poets smuggle out word by word the wounded gazelle’s cry.

Martha, occasional practitioner of the ghazal form, quits her song not yet having uttered the wounded gazelle’s cry.

BUT NO

You might think-- but no. There, there, little glitch. Every mother’s morning crust & cuddle warms to her own oddling infant error.

Factored in, figured out & even then held harmless in human arms: you might think arms in armories, inventoried municipal guns & grenades, but no, just a mother’s in loose lime sleeves, a terry robe she tugs whose hem, wrists & elbows wear & tear up to her eyes’ corners’ worntorn tears but no drone-fired outburst of Afghan weddings spatters unsightly upon her, & today she’s off from a staunch American cubicle whose papers want their processing but no one wonders through the manual: not she. The baby flaps like pennants raising wherever human mettle revs on notions refreshed during hours of irrational dark, but no good night’s sleep rallies the rest of us much, wee one-- protagonies confabulate among themselves such quests as somebody ought to have ventured, but no one did or does.

Antipersonnel myself some days, I pray let it begin with me. Our suicide recruiters croon yes yes! --but no still seems to be all I’ll give or take for an answer. HINTERLAND

Ten exiles nodded in passing ten refugees into nowhere, each one packing another into or out of each other’s kicking sacks. Sun swap, star swap: but We did not bring anything else we wish to trade today.

Population peripheries bobbed weaving the dunes. Ochres bled into maroons as lengthening late deformities of landmark. Sir, this means you, sir-- Thus had an awkwardness over fine military hopes dithered to end.

A brother shot meat, a sister wrung water. The lid slid the slot of the goat’s eye. Distant elephants’ puzzlement persisted as their matriarchs taught the calves however imperfectly, but we preferred to insist that our waking moments’ perplexities solve of themselves: resolve: dissolve: the dry sweets into succulents & the half-nots into nothings-but, endearments & so on.

NOT ABOUT YOU

& so on, until the poem attains next to nothing to say, shakes off its language.

Grandmother, not a tooth in her head & demented, preferred to finger just the poem’s dripping hemlock plumage, its fiddleheads up & all too soon its ostrich ferns chest-high & if there ever was any poem, illegibly thickened under the fronds.

Which way to turn hasn’t the poem already turned?

Grandmother got on the poem’s nerves, got on its mountaintop gondolas, got on its silky trolleys below, trikes & trapezes. At first her dog tried to call grandma home but every single living bark quickened distracted & hustled off.

Of its volition the poem bayed for moons dodging around some of the planets grandma’d amassed during her halcyon days. The moons quickstepped along gravities & skipped solar loops doubledutch in a memory, while her dog’s life narrowed down to a marrowbone tousled with ants in the grass.

Late fall, a hunting season. A killing frost. The poem rounds up nearly every village stray & prancing together off they go. BEYOND ME

Morning: all I’d counted on flapped off, migrated across a street where a loose newspaper folio blew too, nooseprint in a fit, lasso loop I saw a cowboy once flip at a rodeo calf, half calf, half clown, crumpling half down.

Lunch. Incarnating a fellow-being, I relished fishflesh beer-battered & deep-fried, then treated myself to subplots-- several in festival-- making them up on the fly, whose multiplicitous eye complicates least little things.

Later a dusk around the block, shoulder blades winging. Maybe I can’t guess where the house I live in is, did it move next door & where did the cowboy? Half of scarface the moon advises been there, done that, been done, there there.

Isn’t the end yet? The many happy returns of the day throng & belong scrambling the salt marsh that must’ve been sobbing for them-- all this time-- until their distant yackety yacked louder & shrieked the louder as they arrived. ALL THE PRECEDENTS, IN ORDER

I’ve forgotten my souvenirs. There was something from somewhere somewhere. Or, if a thing I think I remember I make up, even the voice meant to summon that other voice it spoke in.

I practice an alphabetical life. Gingerly, pursed breath, tiptoes, awe. Please don’t feed or annoy the animals. Twenty- questioning one after another root vegetable as to its trace minerals.

Dear departed, stash me in a fanny pack and simper us through Customs. Slip me underneath my true love’s door to loop around invisibly in my eloquent lemon ink cursives.

And then what happens? Wait, wait-- I almost know-- a whole room turns its faces to mine in anticipation. I get called on in class. My hand wasn’t up. I memorize. I recite. ICE OUT

Scrunched up, hopelessly in its own way, the river staggered, tripped & stumbled over its ice chunks. Muscle on, thundered the moon.

Once when I thought I’d lost my mind I found it wandering far from the litter of life’s little lessons tumbled away, even the corners scoured, even of air. Where to celebrate, if my namesake visits again? Daddy’s old bomb cellar, jars, jars, raisins, mother’s pickled snowflakes, other yellow squalls of nothing going gone to waste.

Crepuscular, my mouth likes to pronounce. Dark curls up comfy in the scar at my left eyebrow first thing each evening,

& if you can coax the river out, the river plays its trick-trickle & yes you do forget yourself, just like that. IV snake & snail BURN

Cantilevers of light tilt the woods: stories upon stories, green, quick, dead, green.

Trillium gone by. I saw the jack-in-the-pulpit patch & the not- yet ladyslipper spot & I heard, I thought, not muttering war, just snap-&-crackle my one more storm debris fire, stout log crib in flare, in exuberant cheer-- day’s luck into luck’s labor to whirl away here on the mossy stair of the snail & the snake I’ve disturbed, & who make do right over there.

THE BREAKFAST NOOK

We’d pout. Our mother, brisking off, urged Darlings! --your vitamins & minerals dissolve inside with the milk & this-&-that into instructions rejiggering more vitamins, minerals, milk & this-&-that to fizz up & turn into actual you, or me, or anybody & etc.

Experiment: --you might let drop capsules & milk into spit in one another’s cups. Watch, wait; think, add, stir. I’ll be right back.

One day it quits. The whole business quits. Imagine that. AGAINST CONSOLATION

When you were a little child (someone is sure to say), you were so scared to upchuck!-- you would have to go down on your knees and stick your head in the toilet--

Listen, this will make you feel better: it is death, your very own death, & though it burns behind your nose like shame & blisters your frank tears like shame, you may try it on like a good best dress, like the lace- on-lavender remember you had to slither into, wriggle it off you inside-out?-- or take a dip like early morning when the river mauve would gulp you in: chilly, it stung & soothed your sides; another turn like the lively turns you’d practice among the pearly currents a gritty flux runs now to snag in as you always knew it would one day, as the sunlights networked the ripples even then for the years to come, is it not so?

It is not so! Not me, I will not say so! But let the Mother of Drums’ whole fury signify, & let her rise spitting teeth for us little ones; she chants upon her stout hide & viscera how passionately every eerie ghost has plotted from nil into its one body, it howls for its very golden bowels, its spleen. MUTT MIX

Poor devil, dog six years on a tether clipped to a cubby box. The sun dropped into a slot on one side & after a dark spell popped up on the other. Birds of a weather chattered along wires overhead & the yards around shrilled emergencies.

Who knew? Once upon afternoon a dust demon spins itself up in the master’s tumbleweed to his match scratch: puff: mega blaze & four hours’ ruckus until doused out. I’ll bask three days in wonders. I’ll slobber & yawn. I’ll gnaw & grunt in my groin to my heart’s content.

They say death changes a body's mind about things. Master shuts up & just rots. TAINT

One bad afternoon I pried open a box that showed up with my name in marker on it on my bottom doorstep. From under the flaps whiffed out such profound cold and silence! I only just peeked; enough to see it was full of black space and millions of slight white galaxies astir, then I shut it all up fast again.

That was a stinging afternoon. Girls had complained, I know who, they sent me home from the shop before ninethirty break because I stank. I had fumes in my fat. I had cancer in my teeth. Everywhere I turned I spun off piquant squirms of shame.

My stink’s of the baby years ago that died inside, it held there dead three weeks without I didn’t know, frightful time they had too to scrape out the all of it, rotting like it was; was my boy that would’ve been.

My youngest comes Thursdays, with those kids. That day I was telling, I tired myself of wondering would I -- so I showed that box the one time, right off & to the side, to have it done. She says ma just never mind, & that’s right, a thing like that, but then we didn’t either put it for the rubbish; it’ll be somewheres still,

& my job they put me off a distance turning the pockets, picking out the corners sharp so the stitchers next needn’t have to fuss & miss their rate.

Once in the odd while I talk too much, I’ll babble, I’ll get prowly down the road an evening in the prickers, take the dog & run him, grab at his tongue, yattata yattata, until we just flop both ourselves & lie down right there, let our whole fleshes creep. WATERSKIN

Thanks, think tanks, for the thoughts, Ophelia murmured among the pansies, & thought of the gagging pond, mud like snot, & distant whistles & twitters of minstrels having nothing better to do than each to embellish & tweak at another’s song.

Practice! lied the lyre. Meticulous practice instead performed the pond-physician: attached its first- leech-best to the one patient-at-hand: exact match to Ophelia’s peculiarities, a blacker- than-usual leech, stringing out now, oozing her ear, edging her face petals.

Episode: Ophelia twitches up in the drunk tank, acute water intoxication. Reconsider, the pansies advise, yourself as a vessel. Hoist to moisten lips. Sidle bodily some shifty Sahara dune to refresh the lost; raise yourself as a gourd overhead to constellate slaves’ escape. Think: disguise. REINCARNAL

Goober Pea the yellow lab & I, drunk on lilac, collapsed into the runoff ditch & switched species: I’m a yellow- fever mosquito now & he’s the born-again bluetick-tattooed bitch in boots, both of us bloodsuckers these our latest lives around

& comprehending each other either rather less or possibly all the more than we think today we thought we did before: anyhow wicked fleshly fellow-innocent culprits sentenced to serve time.

At your service, time. ZOMBIE JAMBOREE

Jokes the dead tell crack me up. What pranks they pull! I get beguiled into their collective daffy grin.

Regularly that nightmare waste management crew poor daddy hired trucks on by, hauling the undertonnage off & out the mute inglorious exits to this very day, leaving behind a little dead energy twitching itself on the porch where the butter dust churns, & I succumb to hokum.

Mother mutton, creature-comfort me! She who knocked to her knees, stupefied in the abattoir; she unbidden who used to quote the zerotonin reuptake exhibitors verbatim.

The dead covet my tongue. Covet my tongue, you dead, la-la! Tickle a brick if you can, like a lickety -split single-footed snail.

Fourteen dead on a ledge, nine on a shelf: king & conqueror, the erotic vine at kink & canker, verisimilitude itself.

Gonna blueberry-jam summa them heebie jeebies now! the dead call out. Youc’n thump that bass humdinger you near forgot you had & we’ll croak it together like last night’s ambi-phibian pond.

Oh, look: all the baby dead of 1946 curled up together in a heap, higgledy-piggledy, omnium-gatherum. TASK FORCE

This’s what passes for love, close enough, tingling the fur follicles, purring to oneself:

Fraidy the cat, content that an astringent breeze fuming from small sunny leaves wriggles through the verandah lattice, around the wasp-paper lantern. Down the road the cemetery surnames studding the quarter-acre lawn refurbish their mossy & lichenous denotations after yesterday’s hectic mowing followed by last night’s teens' mischief self- instructing at combat, poor things. Mauls, home- brew explosives: it’s like work, except that you love it. ADVANCE DIRECTIVE

ADVANCE DIRECTIVE

Lowlife, my love, listen to the brain- dead woman and the brain- dead man

in adjacent cities, queen and king of the vegetables, sighing along with their smooth machinery like the leaves

astir along the interstate shoulders and medians, riffling the hot parking lot islands of one more (& tomorrow of yet

another) moth-fluttering evening. Terra firma, whose roots fibrillate underneath traffic but hold the humus just

loosely-enough together to breathe, also hurls its great stone plates crumpling very slowly forward and back

as it swells & eddies magma. Love, live with me helplessly and at mercy, the more like these two.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

These poems, some in slightly different form, first appeared as follows:

Boston Review: “Olfactory Cues” The Chattahoochee Review: “Triphyllum Impulse;” “Burn” Cleaver: “Undersong” Denver Quarterly: “Mystery Package;” “Precipitations;” “Task Force” Diode: “Alice Apocryphal;” “Gamma Egg on Memorial Day;” “He Recollects Her Finery;” “Not About You” Faultline: “Against Consolation” Field: “Bill & Coo” Innisfree: “All the Precedents, in Order;” “Big Bang” The Main Street Rag: “Reincarnal” Matter: “Cove, Swells;” “Mise en Scene” Mudlark: “Dysfluencies;” “Forecast;” “Holiday;” “My Debt to Society;” “Waterskin” The National Poetry Review: “Finale” One: “Troth” Poetry: “The Breakfast Nook;” “Charm Before Sleeping;” “Mutt Mix” Poetry Daily: “Anathema” Poetry Northwest: “Beyond Me;” “Séance” Quarterly West: ”Paradise;” “Petit Mal” (nominated for Best of the Web) Rhino: “But No” River Arts Review: Voices from Northern Vermont: “Community Help- Yourself;” “ Mechanical Bank” River Styx: “Anathema;” “Pearly Everlasting” Scoundrel Time: “Beauty Sleep;” “Zombie Jamboree” Skid Row Penthouse: “Ghazal” Slice: “Dubious Provenance;” “Hinterland” South Dakota Review: “Advance Directive;” “Afterspat” Southern Poetry Review: “All Hell;” “Ice Out” Sou’wester: “Futurity;” Spillway: “But I Digress;” Mothers’ Day” Superstition Review: “I Wake Up Without a Navel” Sycamore Review: “Taint” Waxwing: “Fever Blessing;” “Minna” Writers on Line: “Deer Visit” Yale Review: “Bottom;” “Hearse”