The Cinnamon Peeler Read Free Page A

were composed.
    With the clarity of architects
    he would write of the row of blue flowers
    his new wife had planted,
    the plans for electricity in the house,
    how my half-sister fell near a snake
    and it had awakened and not touched her.
    Letters in a clear hand of the most complete empathy
    his heart widening and widening and widening
    to all manner of change in his children and friends
    while he himself edged
    into the terrible acute hatred
    of his own privacy
    till he balanced and fell
    the length of his body
    the blood entering
    the empty reservoir of bones
    the blood searching in his head without metaphor.
GRIFFIN OF THE NIGHT
    I’m holding my son in my arms
    sweating after nightmares
    small me
    fingers in his mouth
    his other fist clenched in my hair
    small me
    sweating after nightmares.
BIRTH OF SOUND
    At night the most private of a dog’s long body groan.
    It comes with his last stretch
    in the dark corridor outside our room.
    The children turn.
    A window tries to split with cold
    the other dog hoofing the carpet for lice.
    We’re all alone.
WE’RE AT THE GRAVEYARD
    Stuart Sally Kim and I
    watching still stars
    or now and then sliding stars
    like hawk spit to the trees.
    Up there the clear charts,
    the systems’ intricate branches
    which change with hours and solstices,
    the bone geometry of moving from there, to there.
    And down here – friends
    whose minds and bodies
    shift like acrobats to each other.
    When we leave, they move
    to an altitude of silence.
    So our minds shape
    and lock the transient,
    parallel these bats
    who organize the air
    with thick blinks of travel.
    Sally is like grey snow in the grass.
    Sally of the beautiful bones
    pregnant below stars.
NEAR ELGINBURG
    3 a.m. on the floor mattress.
    In my pyjamas a moth beats frantic
    my heart is breaking loose.
    I have been dreaming of a man
    who places honey on his forehead before sleep
    so insects come tempted by liquid
    to sip past it into the brain.
    In the morning his head contains wings
    and the soft skeletons of wasp.
    Our suicide into nature.
    That man’s seduction
    so he can beat the itch
    against the floor and give in
    move among the sad remnants
    of those we have destroyed,
    the torn code these animals ride to death on.
    Grey fly on windowsill
    white fish by the dock
    heaved like a slimy bottle into the deep,
    to end up as snake
    heckled by children and cameras
    as he crosses lawns of civilization.
    We lie on the floor mattress
    lost moths walk on us
    waterhole of flesh, want
    this humiliation under the moon.
    Till in the morning we are surrounded
    by dark virtuous ships
    sent by the kingdom of the loon.
LOOP
    My last dog poem.
    I leave behind all social animals
    including my dog who takes
    30 seconds dismounting from a chair.
    Turn to the one
    who appears again on roads
    one eye torn out and chasing.
    He is only a space filled
    and blurred with passing,
    transient as shit – will fade
    to reappear somewhere else.
    He survives the porcupine, cars, poison,
    fences with their spasms of electricity.
    Vomits up bones, bathes at night
    in Holiday Inn swimming pools.
    And magic in his act of loss.
    The missing eye travels up
    in a bird’s mouth, and into the sky.
    Departing family. It is loss only of flesh
    no more than his hot spurt across a tree.
    He is the one you see at Drive-Ins
    tearing silent into garbage
    while societies unfold in his sky.
    The bird lopes into the rectangle nest of images
    and parts of him move on.
HERON REX
    Mad kings
    blood lines introverted, strained pure
    so the brain runs in the wrong direction
    they are proud of their heritage of suicides
    – not just the ones who went mad
    balancing on that goddamn leg, but those
    whose eyes turned off
    the sun and imagined it
    those who looked north, those who
    forced their feathers to grow in
    those who couldn’t find the muscles in their arms
    who drilled their beaks into the skin
    those who could speak
    and lost themselves in the foul connections
    who crashed against black