City Animals

(with thanks to david berman's "community college in the rain")

A one-eyed duck loiters in the church parking lot, one-legged too until he kicks suddenly the tucked-up foot down towards pavement.

Even then a knot of albino squirrels tumbles by making red-eyed love –

no, fighting – no, fucking.

The houses don't look enough like faces in the city thinks a man scowling down the street, pink box of sugar heismanlike under arm.

Now, an unmarked van, full of stolen children, idles before the construction site.  Or this is where the white squirrels come from, manufactured in the glove box. Next:

the baby who hungers for rocks, force-fed a nipple in the park, who pangs for an length of concrete, a pebble on the tongue, face towards obese seagulls, circling against the palings of the sky.

We'll meet again someday, the man thinks to the child, in the wild hotels of the sea.

The daily stroke

There is language in your look:

baled the way grass balls a dog’s vomit.

A golden sphere.

This welter of words

an eclipse in the throat.

Sometimes I think there is not enough of

you to give.  I’m sorry to say you are stingy with

love: something thins out

in you, stretched, a limit.  You can’t

bear the weight of generosity,

yours, mine.  I’m sorry to be the one.

A welter of heat in the sphere.

After we speak, my brain does like a dream,

working to explain, manufacturing

connections but poorly, still sparking.

So we wait for a catastrophe;

fire licking through the basement,

the baleful hum of storm sirens. 

We are forever meeting each other this way,

huddled in the dark drive,

waiting for the all-clear.

Atonement

Then, a bird in the road, dead of fever.

Wings outstretched.  Yellow-bellied.

Stupid as a suicide & as careless --

the woundless skin, the wretched youth.

Some sort of swallow has made its nest

in our building's side, anchored in ivy;

a glorious tumor of trash. Plastic bags withed

into knots.  White pith of pear.

Save these pieces for our friends,

the dead. They should know this;

the slick of a petal, the spread of a paw.

Even the alley, reeking of urine.

I'm ready to confess: I can't give it up.

Let's not.

Let's.