Blasphemy

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

We didn’t have any bears and so drew straws / to dress up in the bear-suit and stand, vinyl-fanged // jaws agape in the hotel lobby.

But I am an amateur / among these bird-cries & must train—

It was the sound of an historical wrist, of resistance

I wanted to know them, woman and man / the spice of chlorine and adrenaline / to be with them at the edge.