With my sweetheart, under the gallows tree
Just them and me
and some dried shoes and a union suit woven into the soil
A posterior root that fans at the ground a rosette of ovate, wrinkled, crisp,
leaves like a stack of small bills on a gaming table,
somewhere between
paid out and settled up,
and a green white flower bearing succulent and lovely berries
poisonous to all
except soul-free women, disloyal curs and
spirits that welter in tall-necked bottles
like portrait collars
from which flow the stuporous syrups of sleep