birds and water are drawn from lines
say from a lookout in the desert
where the smoke still can be seen
rising, see it as lines
you can dig for fish bones in the sand
and find them fully dressed and sharp
hot as the bottom of a furnace
and wonder where it should follow for sequence
what I wanted was a little wisdom, carrying
images of mountains between my ears
and the dactyls of Homer, those having
to do with teeth, scales, sea bottoms, and the insides of bags
the outlines of ponds I can still see in that house
up the street where a friend would show us
a bullfrog, the gold fish, some strange plant
that reminded me even then of the right-most
panel of Bosch’s Garden that might not seem all
so delightful at all but still I wanted to reach
in and touch the smooth leaves, the red flower,
the granite water that reflected our interested heads
because all these things would be something new
to remember more so, something more, tangible
sensations above what I might read between the lines
where the artifacts we carry burn in words
a broken bone no matter healing is always broken
and reveal themselves so that what we took for two eyes
one day might exact as an elephant or a sword
or a shattered poem drawn onto clay or divisioned
into church panels. I’ve never understood
what might be needed really at a locked door
or what I might do with a little piece of bullfrog’s
stomach spooned onto the back of my tongue
what to do then with those lines of birds
and those images of ponds smoking on the hot sand
where Hamlet is always dead and dying
how heavy am I, I ask,
and answer at any given moment:
a frog’s eye, a pond, and flowers falling red from the sky
is how heavy I can be
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[…] gratitude for once broken bones carrying weightlessly now the drops of words […]
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