Beauty is Imperfection

Bite off the hand and eat gold

From the dead arm of the Antietam soldier

Leave him on the lawn

In between the poles of ash

In the litter and Moses Wagon

They’ve drawn

Shear off your whiskers, anchorite, with metal noises

With the badge of confederate stripes

Your woman with high cheekbones

And pinched, Guatemalan eyes,

They split her open like a melon, and her eyes rolled back in her head—

They all used her good

Now paint a smile on her

And put her in the ground

Tucked as a pea,

A bump uncomfortable

for posterity

to sleep on

And after trading the bad specie

For new,

Shed the woman (still a note not made)

the gray coat and the bivouac,

Pulling up the rails behind you

Move to California (for

You were always Western in heart.)

You have hard tack in bags and

The Yankee’s gold chips

Raze the old mill house

And birth a livery

Tend horses for the unioners

Riding in with bloody uniforms,

Toothless mouths,

Spotsylvania-

Spittle covered hard stories

Clean the boxes with her portraits

And bury them all with the dead green rinds

Bury another dead wife and another

plucking from each sad one,

blueberry of a southern son

and they will call the business theirs in time

And history will then always know you,

Distinguished gentleman with a beard

(Originally posted July 29, 2007)

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Roman candles fizz after twilight,
And bottle rockets skid burping
into New Year’s champagne
Halting, my hand under a mouth
Parabolic potential
And zeroes;
When the fireworks’ rage
Waits to spend itself
In rain; in blue Technicolor tears
But duds, the long silk legs not achieved

Manhattan labored
through green prisms of stammering fog
And under the Brooklyn freeze: Base relief
When you, bold,
Hold to the water chains
You, with your nubile
lazy eye, to kiss there.

Kleig lights ignite the fog.
An explosion in the mouth:
Near the water;
The red hooks … apple down
32 feet per second per second

I didn’t think you’d do it
Too much riding on …
Too much pride for surrender
Too much joy in privation

A drunk swig, and a
suicide jumper in mid-air, you.
Afraid at the event horizon

Bombs are opened
in the infinity of post offices
Imagined,
Only abstracted through hair;
Only one light, one
Existence.
Closed between you, my h___,
My H____
My h____

(Originally posted July 19, 2007)

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