Key West, January 7, 2010
One rooster sneezes non-stop
and another dribbles blood
down the front of its chest.
Tell me what use is a bird at this hour
unless it be clearing its throat of our woes?
The noise from the bar kept us up again.
That Billy Collins impersonator blow-
drying those poems he’d left out
on the deck overnight and a pirate
testing his sword on the sole of his Ked.
The entire state’s under a cold snap,
the local news uncrating its arctic-
white captions, oft-panning
to the crops doubling over—
miles of oranges enduring the ice,
their skin this refrigerator-finish.
So how much of this tropical print
haven’t we dreamt-up before--
only more lurid, a direr red?
Insects grow more listless on the sills
and breezes chill our smiles into zeroes.
I have been utterly underutilized down here.
Cocked to the sky, a vowel’s open throat--
not so much a becoming, this cosmic comb-over
as it is something asterisked taking on absence.
Wellington, January 29, 2010
Any of the woefulness, low-blows
not signed into law, papering the walls
of my heart were used to either pad
my libretto or slow down the aspirations
of our den’s ancient drapes.
I tried not to swallow my tears
but what hadn’t been stolen
had been entered as such.
It seems much of what rates
as intolerable for me has been mostly
lost on you, tossed to those emptiest of lots.
Tomorrow, men with rat tails, purplish
tats, will start replacing the old tar.
We will sit in our cars, plates of grapes
on our laps, race forms slapped limp,
while the sun morphs into fool’s gold
and we dig how the clouds glide
like the wonder our gods have outsourced.
Plovers move in accomplished loops
as they’re lowered onto the polo grounds.
What’s not to love of their lopped
ears, the ether-notes and grins
that we wring from them?
Those who aren’t swept south in packs
are left to stew in their pens, just scrape by,
their sorrow multiplied by a thousand.
I have taken up teething again,
giddy upping on fence posts, half-naked
though the gnats have me tagged
as “tiptop” and the humidity’s 3D.
Nope, the past has never had
the least bit of patience with me.
But what’s fated has no memory afterwards.
So I’ll slip the first of many apples I’ll fist
by the scent of clipped fuchsia, electric fence
and tense up as the pony’s lips crinkle,
its teeth clacking like something spring-loaded,
then feel the air it dismisses braid my wrist-hairs
as I look into its worried eyes and see
my deaths drowned, one in each pool.