The following posts --here cataloged as November 2003-- were, in fact, written in 2003. They comprise my first, wet-behind-the-ears attempt at filling a chapbook. Just started to write poetry. Apologies. Tried to recreate Auden's In Time Of War.

Dinner In Ashland

Lear lost no kingdom. Juliet grieved none.
Hamlet was slain by a plastic rapier. Quince
is on a ten month contract. Halleluiah,
we have arrived: bread is bread.
(And one day we will forget what fire looked like)


































Club Flex

I.

The ancient supplication of a boot lick.
What no accouterments? Is this sex or revenge?
The king gets buzzed in a red leather chair.
Someone’s dyke Mom wears a choke chain collar,
her mid-day jeans bulge off her hips.

II.

He wears a flower headdress and feels my pleather.
I tell him, I purchased these at Biscuit King. They
were lying beside a physics book. I complimented
the proprietor on her Country Ham. I prance down
the runway through eyes more ravenous than spotlights.
Yes, I tell him, she is my husband.

III.

The blood is not real, but the bowie is. So is the man with
the corkscrew teetering through his septum. The buck toothed
bird is not strapped to anything. He pretends to be tied
just to hear the Sirens’ song.

IV.

Napoleon, who Specializes in Military Fantasy, stands above
a green laundry basket. She lifts out a gas mask,
cock ring and child’s toy.

V.

He bought that shirt somewhere that played music.
His eyes are eggshells. You pathetic bottom,
she says. He kicks the table post in loose leather shoes.

VI.

Two shoe horns clasp one another. Pandemonium’s axis. Atlas finds his lover. Biceps and forearms, a decagon folded.
A Rembrandt circular.

VII.

Pimply pink buttocks peek through a black leather window.
Adhesive on a post-it note.

VIII.

The man over the turntables jokes about toilet seat covers,
talks of the tractor beneath him. As he says, This is some kinky country.























A Bigot’s Boots

When I loaded the silver box
that you rented to drive South,
I did not know you would give me
boots, your old boots, brown
and marbled, in high gloss,
with rainbow stitched peacocks,
and flames rising from the soles.

I was pleased to pack your globe,
even took time to locate the Union
of Socialist Soviet Republics,
as you watched, sandbags stacked
beneath your gaze, glasses
of radar, bandage on your foot.

I remember how you laughed
at obituaries, how you ridiculed
compassion’s senility, how you
cheered the bottle tosser, and
ignored the child being pinned.
I invite holidays: you are framed
by the grave, now with one foot
proving my case.

But I have your boots—gifts,
ornate symbols of your past.
They leer like closeted demons.
I look and wonder if they have
banged on a White’s Only barstool,
or kicked the ass of the oddball
in the corner.

Do I burn these haunted, hateful
things? Should I consume your
prejudice in fire? Should I set my
flame to your racist pride?

Or do I let the peacock’s pink eye
remain open when I kiss my men?
Do I tap the soles to blues and
march heels to chants of peace?
Can your history, which is my own,
be cleansed by sage?

Boots are not the wearer, I know:
Just leather and string and wood.
Yet symbols are rare and chosen.
And now, needed. Tonight,
I reach for Sherman’s torch and
Atlanta flickers under my feet.





























Medford Mill

He steers a blight down Crater Lake Highway,
past the Table Rocks, the glistening RV lots,
the yellow fields of star thistle, the thrift
shops. When the pumice approaches, he stops:
Arches of water, signs of smoke. Alarm
clocks beep underground. He starts
to douse his storied corpse; he keeps
a drowned boy dead by heaving air in spurts.
It smells of subdivisions, dog bedding.
A Mt. McLaughlin made of small squares,
surrounded by an oil sea, black machines,
black pyramidal piles of pine and Mulberry.
Behind this scene some cruel act lies:
An earth destroyed, and made tender as it dies.

Sights from the Georgia Shore

Dear Lisette, I’m glad you drove.
These Southern high windows are wonderful.
A farmer strolls over furrowed fields,
and five drops pool under her water glass.

From a littoral point of view: a fish
wiggles and a mossy mountain laughs;
An anemone sees a ship motor past.
And at the ocean’s alluvium, a girl
sticks her red tongue into the wind
to taunt a rain drenched Man-O-Ray.

We took ten trips around that cul-de-sac,
going as fast as we could, round and round;
We set the phonograph at low, so slow,
that we could watch the tide from no place.

If I cared to find my pen, I’d praise Georgia.
No need to fake a trade: the pottery here is handmade.




















So We May Be Here

I kiss the scorpion, gone gold, from aging.
Here, the yellow jackets threaten the hand-
icapped. Shards of bark. Purple gazing ball,
a mind rises through history’s geyser crack.
The falcon’s child drinks heavily
in some dingy port town. A slab of dry
wall stands erect on a green hillside,
carried out by who knows whom? When or why?

On Falling in Love With You, I Should Not

I.

(I give you rope, scattered on a floor)
Under a blanket reading Rothko
(Fragments yield safe stories)
A Catholic business man rids himself of rice in a Venezuelan tent
(Future tense is expression of present feeling)
Your father gripped camera Harley handle bars; your mother’s house is full of frames
(There are no words here)
In that scene, you are no bigger than a black powder pistol

II.

(I agreed not to say)
My students banged their notebooks and were ghosts under your guidance
(In the railroad photo you are at least 30 feet away)
Hollow boulders? Snakes might as well grow from the ground
(I do not write stories)
Diner waitresses populate your childhood
(I am already working on your van
—it is brown and yellow to me—
to get you away from
these Mulberry trees)
He scaled cliffs to photograph the waterfall we retain in our skin
III.

(You kissed me and apologized
in a dream; a touch of warmth
with a shock within)
We flipped abandoned buildings like
river rocks

We rearranged illegal letters before the Lord, Amen

(I have a loft bed in Williamsburg)

Covered from rain in a warehouse dock, we saw perfect green and red cycle on the street

Did we really drive 60 miles to stay within the same light?

(Touch me while I am sleepingwhere meaning cannot be made)

On the Abolishment of Marriage
for Barry

Welcome wheel, may we commit to be
happy axles --flat as gantry-- for the president
and his pontiffs to ride.

May we be in sight of one another and
celebrate the slow trickle of apartment homes
from your vagina, casters for the kitchen.

The planets, like our friends, move
in quadrilles. The lonely constellations
shoot arrows into nothing. Darling,

I’ve secured you like a bond. We have
an agreement: to remain hearth-side,
headed where we’re driven.























Letter to an Old Love

Your menstrual stains are mixed with paint,
Our sheets have become my drop cloths.
She loves the feeling of the cashmere you bought.
She borrows my sweaters constantly.
Candles cannot outlast the circles I make on her.
Her tongue speaks Russian and twitches
into my mouth like a snake’s tail,
pressing me up against a peeling door.

I think of you sometimes-- down the street,
moving across the hardwood floors. You enter
my memories as a corpse would, with skin cold as water.
Biting on a pillow’s end, I do not think of you.

XXXIII.

XXXIII.

The white walls around me form a drain,
I sit, cubicle marrow, beside a window,
watching the sun click across the sky.
My gelatin bones twist in an ergonomic

chair, while my corneas remain a static size.
Everyone here is nagged by reluctance:
The same question dangles from their lips:
If I made all my decisions attentively,

how did I end up here, in this place I despise?
Yet this chair is base, a blackness falls at the
line of sight. And so they lie hands clasped,

eyes closed like pharaohs posing for a cast.
The coroner hears their grumbles, while
their confusions melt to wax.

XXXIV.

Yellow cracks in a burgundy vinyl purse,
vague thoughts on a globe, a woman’s
furrowed brow in the meat aisle: she battles
suited harpies from ripping away her rights.

Meanwhile, the manager adjusts his tie
in the television above the electric door.
A woman pushes a cart of ice cream
and mascara, toward check-out, where

I wonder if I am equal nourishment:
“And from these corporal nutriments perhaps,
our bodies may at last turn all to symbol.”

They load brown plastic bags into trunks,
turn keys, strap belts then roll themselves
away in their mirror shaped sarcophagi.


Diorama
for Carl Toth

Once I brought a shadow box to Mrs. Shoreman’s class:
an armada attached to an anchor, a simple photograph
of a family standing in the ocean.

My scene featured a son withholding a bird chested breath,
a daughter wavering on whether to hide or show two dimes,
a mother using her tongue to fawn some taste from the air,
a father grinning as the head of this absurd mallard.

In the corner, a cardboard embrasure hid among
cattails. Inside, it was wall to wall with bears.
I entitled my piece, Figure 80 Shows a Decoy Town
or, Dien Ben Fou. When my teacher asked me to explain,
I squirmed and said, “Sperm meets egg in water.”
Then I poured a glassful into the box. “We may
now see the undertow hit their brittle bronze legs.”

XXIX.

America, you have given me your skeleton
key: I look like a president, and the bully
who wins. My body craves for what is right
I am blinded by greenbacks and green light.

Yet as long as you struggle for me,
my words have nothing to which to refer,
my mouth seals itself: there is nothing
to say at your party line-- observations

without premises; preferences without choices.
The concert is so loud, those standing
in the choir don’t realize they’re not,

and have never been, singing. America, I cherish
my discords with you, for they will be what I breath
when I bury your castes along with my greed.

XXX.

In the caves at Niaux, France, granite
bison stampede over cavernous plains
toward men who knick their igneous hides
with spears, shard their sides with stone.

In Dusseldorf, a man rushes to save
the damsel strapped to a movie screen’s
steel tracks. He rips the nylon, angering
the audience unjostled by the wail.

And here, foreign soldiers are put in one to three
glass jars of blood and ether. The closer
to reality they look, the less real they are.

In night vision, no one dies outside
the frame: Death occurs at conception. To
watch while blinkless is to not watch at all.


XXXI.

Republican National Convention. 2004

Wide Shot, Woman in Kitchen, Working
Over White Counters. Child runs in,
grabs green grapes, darts through door.
Announcer (V/O): In your home’s heart,

there has been a microscopic invasion,
a network of bacteria malicious and lurking
to strike you or a family member
at any moment. You might not even know.

Fortunately we have a Texan for this
Manichean match-up, who penetrates
the shadowy regions where germs live.

He even goes to those hard to reach areas,
to battle them on their own turf. He is an
exclusive chemical solution, perfectly concocted.

XXXII.

America, yours is a vicious wealth.
What of these banquet tables filled
with hands? What of these libations
which burn our lives on the hill?

The tycoon sees himself the pauper,
by citing the day he went hungry,
The audience finds this endearing
and says he has paid his spectral dues.

Increasingly, my dinner comes from
ringing pocket change from my neighbor’s neck,
from grafting new desires onto his head.

Is this what you intended? Must we deceive
one another in order to live?
Must we choose between bread and water?

XXV.

Today even the cops are calm; trees
reflect in their helmets, while they
oversee a polite public march
Excuse Me quiet around the capital.

Here is an antique machine’s trial run,
atoms unaware of voice and bond.
Say “Citizenry” and envision ten years
of stadium speakers sounding like us.

The President, inside his house, dines
without concern, says he loves democracy.
He continues along with his course,

thinks nothing of citizens who knock and
go away. The difference, dear reader, between
request and demand is a readied red brick.

XXVI.

Walking through the mall, I spot uniformed
men and women in Banana Republic,
sorting supplies, and I think this war
is bought in tank tops, battleships

blown by sales of linen, televisions,
answering machines, boots, dog houses,
internet connections, all point to this
predicament: even banners of peace

are bought with dollars of war. Our weakness,
this slimming gluttony by which we live,
is the blue felt collection plate of a crusade.

So we walk with guilty purses, culpable
billfolds, murder made in simple transactions,
by generals unaware of their medal.


XXVII.

Here’s to that awkward age when you’ve seen
the street more than once, and sense yourself
annoyed by gravity, and how firmly all things
cling to the earth. Here’s to that fearful time

when circumstance falls like fencing, and you
feel, at destiny’s first sighting, a welling fight.
You long for upheaval, so strongly that
a revolution’s direct object is irrelevant.

There, then, lies a dangerous desire: to want
the world to do your work in metaphor.
You want to be astonished, beat fate,

be renewed by a new order. Alas,
a revolt born of boredom sends you
running naked into requested chaos.

XXVIII.

On my way to town, I pass these plastic
pods that all landed last night, gray fans
humming as if on rockets, convex dishes
making synchronized swivels toward the sky.

Exurbia revolves around its satellites,
its complex codes being beamed by
leaders with botaxed brows and box
lamps reflected at retina’s edge.

Through this lunar landscape, flags stick
beside well houses, from tree stumps,
on SUVs’ backgates: red and white

barcodes bought and displayed as parking passes.
When the music stops, all the chairs get cul-de-saced: Support this war or be a ghost of nations.

XXI.

Is there a rain strong enough to wash away
Times Square, to fill that aquarium
of light with water, to douse that borealis
among buildings, to overrun that eddy

of electricity, to flood out those secret
aqueducts of commerce? Out of that square,
a beast’s breath sucks recruits through two glass
doors, exhales a draft sufficient to float

the world’s gun metal gray. Here, 400 miles
away, I yell for rain, even though I know
only a patient pulling of plugs will end

those lights, return stars to the city,
and blow away the colorful cold
front stationed there.

XXII.

Across Franklin Street, beside a letter box,
a counter-protestor mocks us, while
wearing a stars and stripes bikini.
Boys surround her, as if she is

their mascot: an anorexic lady liberty,
a picture at the center of a brick wall.
I think about the scene’s inception,
the moment they said, ‘Yes, we’ll

show those hooligans. We will rub vacation
and flesh in their faces.’ Her body is a thin
adjective: Her tit offers only its own image.

This is what we’re fighting for,
the boys say by patting her back,
hoping to win one war after another.


XXIII.

At a protest in Chapel Hill, a boy in black
blocades his parent’s blue-lit station wagon,
while lights swirl on a walking mob. He jeers
and taunts the chrome, behind, honking.

Rallied below well-dressed bottles,
the crowd circles in the intersection’s
center. The boy breaks out a flag no one
would hang, but perhaps put on a grave

or wave at a parade. It is stapled
to the edge of a brittle pine pole.
Old polyester glory, a symbol

for simple emphasis. (Words do not mean what
they once did). Camera men take position, the bottles lean in:
flag smoke smells of ignorance and freedom combined.

XXIV.

Last night in the bookstore, a peacenik
described torture in detail. The etc, he said.
And the audience, on seats edge,
listened aghast and left with renewed vigor

for their fight, and the swagger of a good
meal finished. What do you do when
condemnation is your red ticket inside?
when your enemy’s actions

become a nourishment of their own?
Violence cannot remain unsaid,
but what of a mind’s request to romp

among heinous detail? This landscape
offers exercise, but no health. All while a pathless mountain stands behind.

XVII.

When the face collapses behind the countenance,
we are left with cities that cannot fold
like metal, like flesh. Spires stretch
across the earth, a glass monarchy

grows underground. Criticism is praise to
this monolith; its building back is open,
displaying an airy architecture of fear. Seamless
city of momentum, ambitious stalwart thrust

of a citizens’ pursuit of happiness certain
as place. I am a corpuscle who paces this
waterproofed earth, taking cross sections

flat as linoleum. My head is full of thoughts,
avalanching shards, the sound of future
footsteps on a found illiquid landscape.

XVIII.

It is a cold spring evening. I sit
Indian style in a leaning log cabin
and try to see dissent at the base
of my murky full cup. I read a book:

the story of a stowaway dressed
in a sailor’s suit, captaining his ship.
Rising, I kick the red carpet which
gets caught below my feet, trip over

a wrench suited for empire and ambition,
and get below my sheets. Breathing low,
I try to decipher between silence

and my home’s quiet. Where Li Po’s slow
brother sleeps, Nero rises. Last night’s clay
mug turns to gold, and my geographic chore.


XIX.

To the binds which yearn for peace, those cells
which crave not air but movement, in the way
that there is no object without space. Pockets
seem a diver’s weights and fire contained in head.

You envision a Midwest you’ve never seen,
while standing amid a village green halted
at doorsteps, ruled by the discriminating
logic of skin, the curious fear of wind.

To this, I say, burn the food in your cabinets,
take your sofa to the roadside at night.
Fasting and risk beget buoyancy when

our ship sinks due to the chandelier
no one noticed or needs. Minds rot in safety:
which means there is only one way out.

XX.

America, you breed small dreamers,
yet who can sleep under your setless sun?
You are a steady wind, a mangle’s gentle
current, drawing sensation and writing soft

roads. You send me into your paradox:
when you rescind my rights in order to save them,
when I thank you for helping me across your chasms,
when you protect me from the crimes you commit.

I do not know why visitors crowd to get
inside your empty vault. People here speak
as if your laws made their lips, as if your

expiration would mean their death. Do they not
see the cerulean sky forms a dome? Do they not
know there have been other houses in history?

XIII.

Engrid lays her lights across the lawn,
then wraps them around wires to say
Merry X-mas Troops. Traffic whizzes
as she recalls Truman’s adage: A wife

is the nation’s spirit. Inside the house,
Fuji snakes on his spine for an absent
hand’s affection. A television shows I,
Claudius in poor reception: above a sink,

Lady MacBeth bathes two doves.
Engrid bends parapet-low to follow
a cord toward the house’s foundation.

A green-gold stitched sweater sneaks
below boxwoods. A smokeless signal
rises, as one woman’s plea to the past.

XIV.

How will the desert look under a new
neon moon? After Bush hits his blue
Kennebunkport ball through Hagia
Sophia Hole #8? After Eve sits in an

Applebees, smokes cigarettes, drives
a napkin across the table then leaves?
Samson has no need for Olive Garden;
The Israelites need no Golden Corral.

Since March brown palms of enraged
supplication spit and fan the laurelled
king who rides a nodding donkey into

Babylon, his pockets brimming with
golden calves and halogens perfected on his
own domesticated flock. Good luck.


XV.

For children of empire, the famed corner
never comes. Our revered fury goes to
the grave unprovoked, cellulite dreams
itself into a vigilant image.

Hands do not poke through the yard.
Objects bought to quench mismanaged desires
won’t be recalled. Nothing will smell of sweat,
having been sprayed with effortlessness.

Let even our buildings fall, and debt will
defiantly grow in Victory Gardens, evil
will quickly transfer its balance.

Resilience is to resilence the world’s
murmuring. We return, deaf oppressors,
unaware of the click of our own full tank.

XVI.

I toss my room’s contents at the dot matrix
teeth beaming outside my window, pearls
from a waterless ocean, sun on a weatherless
day, a smile which sends our train through

the grass. Within it’s gaps, cloth crowns,
replicated relics, exit signs, virtual tight
ropes: dreams which do not belong to the
dreamer, flat accidents waiting to happen.

Drivers swerve to better see the kibitzer
over traffic, that rented ideal of pleasure,
giddy as a soccer game with no goals.

The kids who mimic it implode on the
playground. Within every glance, pilotspat and kiss another enameled name.

IX.

When Rush tweaked the antenna bolted
above his ear, his thoughts grew ubiquitous
as oxygen and snapped, flag sharp, over
the neighborhood. Kids ran to their rooms,

locked doors. Stars and stripes shot
out like fireworks. The neighbor’s grins
stay knotted like a stack of green hoses.
Walking down Thrasymacus Avenue, he carried two

gutter spillways as tableaus. A neighbor ducked
below a window and asked, “Is this the cost of nations:
so a supernova may land among whirligigs?”

Rush conjured the Kittyhawk’s aft and children
across the state grabbed for their throats,
suddenly feeling beleaguered by a new light.

X.

When the flag fell from the clothesline
and landed in freshly cut fescue piled
in gradiating green on the ground, an
actress entered the scene, apron and all,

bent down, and gave Old Glory a reverent
shaking. She repined it on the hyphenated line
running across the property, and hummed
a strange rhyme. The cinderblock shelter,

which swayed behind, balanced like a building
on taut black plastic. “Should we take it one more time
from the top?” she asked her neighbor,

who stopped raking. “I should be reproached
for my politics,” he said, and heaved
together another pile of humus and stars.


XI.

Two men stroll down a medina’s avenue
painting red sickles on empty building sides.
They carry a stencil with worn lines
which drips a dark hue by their feet.

Cylinders in hand, they recollect historic
surges of spite and their father, a refined
doctor who sought to staple the world’s shadows
together. “Remember when he combined

the shades of a man and a tree?” one asks.
“What a rough beast it made!” the other adds.
They chuckle and lift cans toward brick.

“No one lives there,” a passerby ventures to say.
“We know,” they reply, irritated, and
continue to fill the negative space red.

XII.

Revolt is a period piece-- black
buckles, lamplight, brown teeth jettisoned
in cockney sounds. Soldiers
lean bayonets against a log cabin’s wall,

then visit with face painted men. Because
my lines push imperial goods into water,
I am the dead pilgrim in an eighth grader’s
desk. Sam Adams sits captured on page two,

surrounded by calendars and brown
bottles. His portrait hangs in the capital,
amid the dusty blossoms of Bastille Day.

Rings of pine become textbooks,
or a booking room’s primrose glass.
True patriotism looks treasonous.

V.

Father, your howl at hour three lead me
to ask why you sought that prying color,
those leather-loving stories of failure,
which were not fiction but lies, obvious

to glean. From the space between banister
rails, I thought of that high pitched wail which
was not you but your cells, freezing in pleasure,
under a wash of blue conical light.

Here I live-- in a country of baby elders.
How am I to respect the sagacity of your fires,
and the fallow fields you’ve bequeathed me?

The slow rise and swivel-shot of flycast wires?
This land is cold: Icarus stays below the trees;
Achillies never seeks himself over the sea.

VI.

Jesus never walked, he only hung,
on Golgotha, for thirty-odd years.
He never overturned money tables,
or appeared on-the-outs with Rome.

When moths gnawed into manuscripts,
his followers preached from palimpsets,
pyred inquiries, packed lacunas with plans.
What surprise is it now? Podiums in sand,

bombastic requests that welcome war, studded
doors that swing wide for rumors. Mustn’t there be
an early service? Tank tracks echo ahead of a late galloping.

Let us mourn: love’s language locked in their
stolid necropolis, their impossible sword
of peace, their bloodied baton of dogwood.


VII.

Yesterday I woke to hear the sound
of canes banging against battle maps,
derricks ambling toward an island,
in atlantic distance from five continents

in protest: out of earshot of a new
Leviathan’s screaming cells. Indolent
suitors of influence, geriatric warriors
wading through wrinkle dreams, waiting

to wrap and rattle the unsheathed silver
sabers of youth, envisioning impotence
without patina, sending sons to blast

a personal dark. Lear’s tantrum strikes the world.
Our daughters die for these errant elders’ envy,
their flesh made memorious, their fear of the field.

VIII.

At night, Siddhartha rushes back inside
castle walls well guarded against wind,
miscreant thoughts, his parents’ palace sins.
He falls to his duvet and turns the TV on:

“Run with no need for water,” an announcer says.
A recorded scene flashes: four thousand
albacore thrashing through dunes, with smile-sized
gasps, making desperate paths into elaborate patterns.

Outside his stone house, thick stocks of sugar
cane refuse to whistle or sway. They clamp,
root tough, into rich soil.

Siddhartha, curls into Maya’s folded affection,
sleeps under the castle’s cross beams, which are
splintered, like the king’s steepled fingers.

I.

There is no Eucharist in Baghdad:
only bombs, infidels, heathen
libations and the reverse equation:
Bread in the road, wine in the street.

Here is the well you can’t exhume,
a spigot of unconjugated hate,
tomb-stacked souls and barrels,
late night revisions that fuel preachers

who follow the red elephant’s ordo,
trade war for embryos, ignore the tale
of how David got on Goliath’s bankroll.

Why should Plato care? The earth and sky
are intertwined like ivy. The weeds choke
the only ones who can hoe them down.

II.

Let us hasten justice so I may write
a death knell for this empire. Let us speak
of the afternoon on which we will kneel
beside a monument, lichened orange

and green, fading in granite disrepair.
Let us lean above our corporate past
and take a charcoal imprint of those
barons’ plan for us—endless rope and rock.

Rubbing an indention, our past
is negative space, sinking earth:
a valley of letters, curving its name.

Fading light catches the texture of
words, until pale paper perfectly holds
the moon: Let our history be our fable.


III.

When the king leaves, he hands you the crown
of an expired nation. You take the throne
in a power suit and manage grumbling others.
The old king rules you from a new distance.

The red tie cinches a newcomer’s neck,
the new hire finds his phone on mute,
By the time the marginal get fire
the ash smolders and wood is wet.

Power pools in history, water runs into
footsteps. The White House hands out
old coal and books. Sam, you’re right:

We have no use for their badges, their mansions
their hand-me down scepters, unless we
want to be new despots of an old nation.

IV.

There is no grain in the grist mill, yet
the oxen lumber and labor in circles,
to soften their bones, and pawl their debts.
What isn’t closed by their path? The sun

encircles the globe. Years and days round
themselves in December. How their sweat
pours forth, unfamiliar. Do their chalk-dry
skulls rain circle dreams too? The walls block

wind and exhale sorrow. Can I sneak in,
kick dust, agitate nostrils? Make the animals
pass through doors, sit on stars, ponder grass?

Let’s say yes. There they are now, in a field:
One leg too long, plowing the air with grins,
trying to forget a past life’s imperial cadence.