The Forgetting Tree

Major, It’s been a hell of a ride

When they finish, let them lob / the spent meat and mumped skin / like siege shot.

This is the vocabulary of killing.

The worst thing we can think of, we’ve done

Only two geese at midnight, only one within my range.

Once the bone has been ground up, who, through muslin, would recognize her hand from a dog’s paw?

Live an orchard life then pulp it for another.

Whether we will their return or not / the dead keep coming back to us

I thought I had died and that death meant repeating a name forever.

We see the night / for what it really is, a house / for our bodies

Starve us, // stave off hyenas with our youth— / our muscle as protein, lion’s bait.

Under this desk I have hidden / for two months. I have tried / at shadowy. Have failed / at being wonderful.

…you can sleep without stretching your legs; / you can live never lifting your head.

Everyone’s face reminds me of a buried city, cars up on blocks leaning through // the slanted light (like jail cells)…

And I know: a hitch-hiker who never enters!

…their sleeping, their dormancy, / how it stirred in me a hunger / black as a pocked tooth.

She is knee-sick and fawning on her felt-tipped prize / for exceeding her bones in the sprinting test.

Oftentimes the bourbon distilleries in this land I’ve pitched / my tent in under-distribute for what I have in mind.

When my arms first grew firm I began to trust / myself to love someone outside my family.

I carried a machine on my back / from a tundra to a new northwest.

we talk about getting another widow / for her to putter with

A huge is an instinct, / a severe is a creature / of proportion.

in the outskirts of Lisbon, the Afrikander, / builds a bone temple for all the lads

Let us legally do what we must do in the dark

Wet pets lounge out in the trees, all the abandoned bits / children leave, beyond what the self wants (to be bigger, / less attached).

I have written this poem on the theme “To the post-3.11 world, as I see it,” but this is just the prelude.

I would make, / it occurs to me one / sun-smeared evening after too much vodka, not / a bad Aztec.

Tonight’s theme is: you are a baby nihilist.

Old one, there’s still time to get your face / Broken in two by a lead-tipped whip.

I’ve seen him before, crawling / under church pews, tying // parishioners’ shoes together.

I’ll death so well they’ll say dying is ripping me off

A tale crashing in the glass garden

Everything that can be done to a man / was done to him.

We were always restless in the boondocks.

My enemies are too young to take me seriously.

I wish there were simpler words for this—to reach a point zero or the limit, to write: “It was so hard without you.”

Trying to make sense of sacrifice is like watching / gravediggers bury something in the shade of trees.

Lazarus woke to the miracle of no longer fearing failure.

Underneath the carnival, on a city pier skirted / In paper dragons, a slow pack, ever indistinct, scavenges a / Great cadaver

can you make a dog, the boy asked, let me tell you / about Tarkovsky and Andrei Rublev, the clown said

My fishhook snagged two catfish / three squid on the zangareio

I was born in the first century of guilt.

I thought of zooaphilia: woman who married / a bear, a frog, a swan, who fed a cobra milk / and then fell in love.

In Al-Najaf, I watched a man’s wound / flitter off his skin, knowing he’d died / two days prior

How long will it take before our dreams / Fill again with varieties of fallen bodies?

the weather has since become so kindly, / so temperate, I forget what blessings / they don’t think they have.

The Secondary Disciplinarian: a monster dropped / from a husband’s dream

This is what a veteran looks like / now, I keep telling myself

The fishmonger of me // walks home with a little fish a little empty, / but the next life will be landlocked