Pretty Boy Pantoun

Here your milk is kept, here your grapes.
Other textures I rescind.
I do not wish to ask! Asking, I recoil!
I puncture the blacktop with tools.

Other textures I rescind.
We arrange small contests in which contact is sure.
I puncture the blacktop with tools.
Salt and motion return as integers.

We arrange small contests in which contact is sure.
Your face is close and accurate and bright as grain.
Salt and motion return as integers.
I am named lying down.

Your face is close and accurate and bright as grain.
Rightly I bring my body with me.
I am named lying down.
Rightly I bring my body with me.

Thirdborn (reading)

Thirdborn

Your master slaughters my prettiest envoys, he will not treat with me, he was my mentor, I return home and the gate is forced, he has strangled my hunting dogs, he has uncovered the vessels of wine for my coronation party to allow flies to enter, he does not recognize my right to the throne, I miss him so much, he will not treat with me, I am his king.

A Bowl A Cudgel The Heart (Riddle)

stacked jury stone pelt
mercy boxcar heel and knell
thrown latch
picked last
loose tooth gravely threshing floor
     
                                                             i am—

tacit mother shards of clay
loosen coarsen lip and grain
shorn drum
demi sun
both hands stoutly shapen mast

                                                             i am—

tiny minnow shucked psalm
freight and crown the water the law
cramped yolk
coiled rope
rude like shelter bloody bulb

                                                             i am—

Diary

3/19
woke, smoked neutrally in the rain, compiled a list: "animals which are mute"

3/26
diluted bleach, ran a mile, ignored my father

4/3
rebuked a stranger's dog, got drunk

4/8
held hands, quartered an apple, startled a traffic light

4/11
received a letter

4/15
is it possible to bless a river without naming it

Species

an animal whose remains, upon decomposition, assume the form and chemical signature of other animals' bones

biologists falsely believe this animal to be immortal

Book report

z
I read red doc> by Anne carson.
It is not about the sun.
It is about lonley factions, river crossings, and the smell of ice.
The smell of ice is ancient she says in the book.
Also this one dies.
I liked the book very much.
z

Shrike

I braid my ribs         engrossed

task of puckered bone

sour clover     flaking teeth

I cinch my laughing greaves

gaily             butcher bird

whistle for a quarrel 

tender cousin          fathom

harken to me         hasten

I admonish my disciple

Primer

       'Let us examine green.  Let us go together'
                                                    Peter Gizzi

1. now we have begun
    huddled like rum runners
    to intuit blue

2. since easter this cough
    like a scant yellow dog
    reproaches me

3. quizzical and brash she
    stalls over the dark fleece
    where redly she compiles me

4. flunking and coughing
    over the vivid caul of an orange
    I grow ashamed

5. doggedly I forgive
    green its brinksmanship
    I begin to mouth its parables

I

draw

both black

nines and travel

over water. I assume

the form of a covered bridge

and you pass under me. I invoke

a thousand graven animals dark as loam

but I still cannot remember where

I buried the goblet. Clouds

gather and pelts stiffen.

I part your hair to

the bone; you 

ask me

to.

Thus Are Wheat Fields

If brothers dwell together and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the dead man shall not be married outside the family to a stranger.  Her husband's brother shall go in to her and take her as his wife and perform the duty of a husband's brother to her. And the first son whom she bears shall succeed to the name of his brother that his name may not be blotted out of Israel.  

Deuteronomy 25:5-10

the water you bring me
is addled with salt

you must eat

my barrow bride

you shirk my kiss

thus are wheat fields

given over to barley

in soil more docile

thus the dog watch

elapses and the mate

assumes the tutelage of the sea

how am I
to impart a child

to a loose stone

or a canebrake
to a woman

who calls me yet brother

Allegheny Ghazal

soaping my arms in the revelatory cold again
in the south field, the ruint old mare has foaled again

fasten a blow to some sorry feudal crosseyed cur
mama chiding, weren't but last week you was told again

planting season, tampering with rubyjane's matchhead nipples
don't know what we'll do if her daddy's paroled again

ore nourishes my pick, a thousand lashes
a bloodline marooned on this mineral shoal again

Lalibela, Ethiopia

xxxx
xxxOf the population of nine thousand, over one thousand townspeople

xxxbelong to the clergy.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxEncyclopedia Brittanica

Hello Father.

Hello Father.

Hello Father.

Hello Father.

Hello Father.

Hello Father.

Hello Father.

Hello Father.

Hello Father.

Hello Father.

Hello Father.

Hello Father.

Communiqué After Running Thirty Miles

An inauspicious morning.  After six days of fasting.  Arrives in the center of town.  To the consternation of the sentries.  A beautiful interloper.  Strangely garbed.  Face like a halved apple.  White and core.  Keenly.  To the disquiet.  Of our women and horses.  Connoting bad checks.  And warm nectar.  Takes up residence.  In the sheriff's house.  Three days later.  Everyone dead. Or mad.

Valley Boxing Authority, June 2011

--------------Sisters, the ring girls
smoke tautly in the parking lot.  The man
holding the bucket says, hands up,
--------------Hector.  Get inside.

--------------The welterweight
with the weak stomach and his opponent
circle each other in the brutal absorption
--------------of orbit.

--------------He shifts his weight
minutely, an astronomer
adjusting his telescope,
--------------licks his chipped teeth,

--------------gets inside.

Axioms

a.  Grief is a kept woman.

b.  To carry water is to release oneself from reproach.

c.  Only ceremony can disclose the blind flank of the lamb.

d.  Every claim of objectivity originates with the wire mother.

e.  Only this shall pass.

Call and Response II

---'When you are corn and roses and at rest,
---I shall endure, a dense and sanguine ghost.'
---------------------------Edna St. Vincent Millay

Shall I occupy this verdure,
shall I be then furrowed and gathered

thus, that thus I may cunningly
become at once embodied and diffuse,

emblem and albatross, that thus you may
continue your baleful research

on chagrin and the faces it makes, may act
as sovereign via the sovereignty of grief,

when now, now the hour enforces
the viability of my body, while now

you write, shielding the page with your arm?

Call and Response

-----'this sand dune

-----built by the

-----storm last night--

-----whose grave

-----is it...?'

---------------Takuboku

the slow lathe
of the sea
its fashioning
into shapes and
pulp the land

how coolly
the gull
monitors our progress
across
the isthmus!

elsewhere

iron sharpens iron

elsewhere your mouth

deliberates

over mine

the ground 

is unsteady but fertile

again, teacher

you speak to me

of death, of building

Conditional

If it is slow and it reddens and cannot bear weight
and it is soluble in prisms and drinking glasses

If it is vast and unshirking and resonant
and it is visible for miles; if it dogs your steps

If it is innumerable and particulate and it hurts
and you can lie down next to it at night
and not hear it leave through the open window

rest, companion.  You may walk upright
here, you may spend as long as you need
dumbly examining the buttons of your coat.