i can have it.
every one of my summer projects
are set on wild
like that one time
someone said that little thing
regarding nothing
indeed about submarine
mechanics, quote, unquote:
they’re more alive than
long winter islands
perhaps or even mightier
than alligators wearing kilts in
the highlands, and that- THAT
you can have. though the quotes are
unnecessary because no one has
yet said this in the halls or in the
walls or in the caaws of the
hatchlings which ought to
have a higher pitch but
who, i wonder, will fix their
squeakers? this. this is the leg of roast ghost.
whatever they said.
every squeak they ever let.
i gotta have it.
every one of my summer aspects
are set like a child
something tried to eat
like a fingerling
who sank and
tumbled along
kicking up wingfish and sand
when the whole ocean
is
dark and asleep and
alive like something
you wrote with a bottle nose
in sea smoke
.
i always love finding those. i must have them.

the only way
to hide sir nosegay
or save his stripes
are tidy strips of coins
or roses or is it
a story regarding
decorative milk glasses
wrapped up and
folded tight to lure me
fifty golden
nags to mind the
foals that always know
their imperfect
birth
poses? i wonder.
and what are lands anyway but
places hands or hoofs make trails
in until they’re broken? they’re tracts
one can’t have
until the horse is old
when all is wrapped in
frilly, bloody, milky
rags and all the
fillies are draped in flags
like gilded zebras
stripeless
as the wall they hang
above like dark candelabras
as stark as a koan for posies

outside
in the settlement by the river
they had brown shoes
black shirts with skulls
and grew beards but
the first bone to go was the elbow crushed
in a fall on frozen mud tracks on the way
back from ice fishing with my father
but i never broke another’s as far as i know;
i never spoke much after that- though i did love arabic
german, french and spanish.
i was 5 when i asked about
what everything meant cautiously. my mother
said i know what you mean in her
best approximation of autumn
leaves falling which is now my favorite song and
my chapeau is like it- grey and
brown and dry and many years
gone. i was at home in NY
when i killed my dog after
a triple mastectomy. i believe cancer is
wrong and so is everything that has hurt
anything i have loved. i have saved many things
even a couple of people like that lady
on hawthorne street and that guy on
the south side and that person i remembered to call.