Things Worth Noting

Fred

The paths govern themselves, hemmed in with brick and lace.

The details are sopping sweet with molasses and syrup

and I have turned the nails and hammered the screws down,

for this dream must be seamless and airtight.

There are fingernails in wheelbarrows, singed eyebrows by the bushel,

abandoned in trains of thought sitting rusted in prairies.

There are whole pieces of flesh missing from the earth,

chunks simply cut out and removed, gashes dripping

with lava mixed with oil, tectonic entrails, the middle of things broken.

I wish for an honest sunset and a humble darkness.

At the climax of any libretto, I always hold my breath,

because I feel as though it is an apocalypse in minature,

at least to me, something incomprehensible and old

and dying in the next instant, an machine

churning and quavering to a stop.

The threat on the air is almost acrid, the bitterness

the bitterness of old medicines and home remedies,

the bars and walls and chains I have installed here.

For an instant, escape is in my hand and on my lips,

until I realize that this is all hypothetical and rhetorical,

that I am only a metaphor for something else

something essential and luminous and altogether present.

I apologize for none of it

not for anything

Labels: Fred

9/03/2008 10:19:00 PM

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