1. The Lard Sculpture
won't last, is avalanching slowly, like the aged
Brezhnev, like a stupendously deflating
Thanksgiving Day parade balloon. The Old Man
snoozes through the after-dinner encomia,
cherubic, digesting his chicken a la king,
not yet nudged awake for his big farewell
to the Historical Society, and the society's
last round of applause. A pillar of books
is all he'll leave behind, and none too steady,
either, books on books.... The minute he's gone,
it'll be toppled. Lard, in this god-awful weather,
what were they thinking? Look at him , though,
the Old Man, dreaming of better times, sleeping
the sleep of the holy. And dying in effigy.
2. Shrooms With Theo
The afternoon snow-warm, cool-humid,
a boxed-in, cottony light-headedness
through which our stripped-bare babble
sounds, my high to his high, ridiculous,
ri dic u lous , each syllable a bobber sucked
under waves of gut-clenching hysterics.
Waves of pinpricks over nape and hands:
a pair of doves fucking above us
in the feathery dark of a pine dislodge
little loaves of snow that, falling,
detonate in bright, tightening whorls
of stardurst, sunsheen and snowfleck....
[laughing] You're old enough to be my — Please:
You're young enough, let's say, to be my — Sh.
jeans creaking kneeward still cherishing
the body outstanding from a squarish tangle
of rustbrown his swaying daylit cock enters
the world & the world pinestraw the silken fsh
of skin over smoother skin the cooling warmth
of open underthings the world lets go
disintegrates to gusts of pollen I breathe in
deep deeper O quick spindrift a blizzard
in full sun Theo the O — & dizzily
clutch him like a stanchion both hands
to the base & he staggers crumples &
comes coming in not clots of nacre
but a flung quiver of needles and pins hot
or cold I still can't tell which
3. Ornithology
My father brought it to me
on a snow shovel, its feathers disheveled,
head altogether gone, and said,
What kind of bird was this?
I glanced at the sooty plumage,
the limp fat scaly pink — I'll be damned,
I cried, this pigeon is banded.
— Another datum for the lost souls
at the Audubon Society.
The stench grew sweeter. I found
a pair of snips and neatly
amputated. The band rolled off.
My father whispered, Look.
Out of the disconnected foot
and out of the shank, a host
of larvae writhed in milky
plenitude, eating themselves
out of house and home
— and now that we noticed,
were dribbling from the severed throat,
and no doubt filled the bulging breast:
millions of them jostling forth
into the light, ready in days
or hours to rise into the air
and bear the body away.
won't last, is avalanching slowly, like the aged
Brezhnev, like a stupendously deflating
Thanksgiving Day parade balloon. The Old Man
snoozes through the after-dinner encomia,
cherubic, digesting his chicken a la king,
not yet nudged awake for his big farewell
to the Historical Society, and the society's
last round of applause. A pillar of books
is all he'll leave behind, and none too steady,
either, books on books.... The minute he's gone,
it'll be toppled. Lard, in this god-awful weather,
what were they thinking? Look at him , though,
the Old Man, dreaming of better times, sleeping
the sleep of the holy. And dying in effigy.
2. Shrooms With Theo
The afternoon snow-warm, cool-humid,
a boxed-in, cottony light-headedness
through which our stripped-bare babble
sounds, my high to his high, ridiculous,
ri dic u lous , each syllable a bobber sucked
under waves of gut-clenching hysterics.
Waves of pinpricks over nape and hands:
a pair of doves fucking above us
in the feathery dark of a pine dislodge
little loaves of snow that, falling,
detonate in bright, tightening whorls
of stardurst, sunsheen and snowfleck....
[laughing] You're old enough to be my — Please:
You're young enough, let's say, to be my — Sh.
jeans creaking kneeward still cherishing
the body outstanding from a squarish tangle
of rustbrown his swaying daylit cock enters
the world & the world pinestraw the silken fsh
of skin over smoother skin the cooling warmth
of open underthings the world lets go
disintegrates to gusts of pollen I breathe in
deep deeper O quick spindrift a blizzard
in full sun Theo the O — & dizzily
clutch him like a stanchion both hands
to the base & he staggers crumples &
comes coming in not clots of nacre
but a flung quiver of needles and pins hot
or cold I still can't tell which
3. Ornithology
My father brought it to me
on a snow shovel, its feathers disheveled,
head altogether gone, and said,
What kind of bird was this?
I glanced at the sooty plumage,
the limp fat scaly pink — I'll be damned,
I cried, this pigeon is banded.
— Another datum for the lost souls
at the Audubon Society.
The stench grew sweeter. I found
a pair of snips and neatly
amputated. The band rolled off.
My father whispered, Look.
Out of the disconnected foot
and out of the shank, a host
of larvae writhed in milky
plenitude, eating themselves
out of house and home
— and now that we noticed,
were dribbling from the severed throat,
and no doubt filled the bulging breast:
millions of them jostling forth
into the light, ready in days
or hours to rise into the air
and bear the body away.