Sly &
seductive, his arrangements of nature,
treacherous temperaments of weather,
canopy breeders of thin green evaporative,
ephemeral silk kimono fastened to equatorial waist.
Odor is what a
corpse transcends unto,
& urea the prescient smell of what is not to be:
expelled waste, yet curative
abuses of joy & the excesses of water-lilies.
His years walk
clumsily over cratered
dream & gypsies with large nipples.
Still scours with surveyor eye & criminal heart
for fates sealed in manila folders,
vacated hospital
beds agape.
Flees grasping steering wheels covered
with the powder of crushed eye sockets.
Abandoned orphans rise up to become poets
only to see verse,
rogue-weed,
spring up among election leaflets
& solemn announcements
of discount rutabagas.
Loss is no match
for knowable void.
Whispers heard in the hall of the dead
drown out Auger’s Ein Heldenleben carrying their names
to slumlords & boys settling scores in the street.
The noblest
utterances are forgotten.
They are gossip in the litany of loss,
sordid woe
delivered in a constricted voice.
He, transfixed by
Finney’s Lear
who could not be Lear again,
stripped bare by Courtenay’s Dresser
finds himself hungry, searching in the morn
for the not heard
not fed not arranged not
surviving not
amassed tumor of not.
Yet affixes himself
to it, not
recoiling, lies naked in its moonlight sweep.
Aches & aches until
he is not dead.
(c) Dark | NOV 1997