Month: December 2010

As if buried above his own tomb,
in range of enemy shells and all the sky;
a hyperextensible X marks the spot
and the signs all lead nowhere

Ready to leap out mid-pomp at some undisclosed date;
if current events could ever warrant
resuming a legendary fusillade
or all the attendant circumstance of a owed office

He never served on this coast,
or alongside the other memorials down this derelict parade route,
yet the cracks are caulked with fresh asphalt and the doors welded shut
“more like a loathsome prison than a wholesome habitation.”

Only ever as West as St Louis,
maybe a certain bottomland whorehouse,
or the Expedition Eve ball hosted for Lewis and Clark
and billed to the new government for a modest $622.75

and never ceasing into the young century, both a formal irritation and recommendation
“Nothing ever restrains them from amusement,
which usually commences early in the evening
and is seldom suspended till late the next morning”

In a bowl on the edge of the forest a vole sat suspended in the ice
A single flaw in a hoary squat jewel; one-eyed keen on waiting for them discover it,
knowing it likely couldn’t hurt

But all brightened morning and all dim snowy afternoon
both on the edge of the woods and through the deep of the woods
and both away from the house and returning upon it, under the power lines and beneath a piquing crow’s eye
she kept describing the sound the ice used to make beneath the earth,
growing outside her windows, diminishing the entire world

Bethick’d he argued from deep within a rapt loft of parka that
nothing has changed, or could ever change
That sound sounds like sentiment, the weakest recollection, lowest common denominator
and You disappoint me just now

The woods then opened enough to stamp their boots clean
and there was room for everyone around the bowl,
and the thaw glossing the vole’s eye
the crow’s ear and eye and
the shards of glass revealing
the growing space available to scuffle or reconcile, or neither

and she argued about sound in a more grand tradition as ‘a space depleted
through the ever-lessening wonder of the earth, and
it still can’t describe the love I lost for you
in this short winter day’