She Smelled Like Trees

Unforgettable voice,

I await your pleasure
on a broken clock
that tells time right
twice a day.

It’s lonely here
where the past metastasizes
(A grassy pasture,
a bouquet of weeds,
a golf course; evolution
shows little prospect
for completion.)
and knows no simple
ending. Ending?
Nothing ends,
nothing heals,
nothing hardens,
nothing’s forgotten.

No one loves
selflessly. We’re selfish
to reveal ourselves
to have selves
and call it nurturing.

What kind of consciousness
is this? With each one
in our ordered place —
alone.

It is the uncanny,
overlaid by the psychic plot
of prolongation, the next days
and the logic of all things not closed.

Progress is this
symphony of agony,
of moaning uncertain notes
in continuance.

These are the acoustics
of going under.

…………………

What Faulkner might teach on “Mammalian Ludicrosities” (“If we could just unravel in time”)

Once you get inside me
what do you expect?
(I am just another
tenement, awaiting a coffin).

We can’t stand our lives
up that long, sagging
towards death, afraid.

There is no little place
to keep shop, to think
the world in shape.

I want to be let in
where the blood runs free
I am dying. To see what?
More than the mind can doubt:
my very self —
tiny, frail, meager, fallen.

Smell yourself rotting
and try not to die.
Instead stay stuck there
pitchforked between iron skies
and copper fields,
alive in this mud puddle
and then
splash, splash!
in our bodies of wetlands,
tears and animal tracks,
no irrigation, just subsumption.

Can you see and still
want to spill you into the world,
the current of the natural
and drown knowing
there is no reason to think?

Can you want to become mud,
to violate you and I
to love our inadequate selves,
to erase the thoughts that began
the boxes that made us believe
in patches and fixes
and all the justifying
to bury the dead
before noting how limited
how alone?

No, we cannot be cleansed
of metaphor —
in this world of empty words
we still want privacy
to be able to know better
why flesh rots.

But you know,
even the best made glass jar
explodes in winter.