voiles and tulles

"posture" is my favorite from you in a long while.

I have to echo blackbird in that I think you're starting to stretch out from the rut you found yourself in. Your work is starting to reach a sort of balance between catharsis and rigidity, especially in the poems that are a bit more sparse, especially in the ones where you indulged in a couple more full-stops than you normally do. It's almost like doing that allows your mind a breath to step back and reign imagery in, albeit most likely subconsciously.
There are still some parts where your rhythm could use some work-- it's a bit clunky, especially in "posture" which I loved in all other aspects. Maybe play with your linebreaks, maybe structure. Just a thought.

Regardless, happy to see more work from you again, especially as it's getting so good.

firefighter

the dark is a barn-raising—
horses scatter brightly
like early thermal weapons, careening toward hay thatch.
flame burls, burgles through windows
moon drags off of trees,
hits the canopy floor with a harvest, gather thud.

the smoke is an imported saga,
you can hear two children screaming
under a quilt on the second story—
their mother is a caper in that nightgown,
blasting like a commanded sea
around her shins.

i cut in to dance,
oxygen slinks away like a dull boy.
your hand has fallen from a nest
shedding adolescence for adulthood's knobs and rafters
smoky with the boggy experience of linen
oak beds, fluttering, topmost children.
i run into you, hatchet-bearing
you laugh, all lip
your tongues snagging
like wound-feigning birds.

the night is rubbed of its velvet
like the extinction of bellboys and elevator operators.
you gape through walls,
lean hot against me until my wedding band warms
like a mood ring, your breath timber-lush,
woozy with wicker. when i find them,
the children mewl like milk-rims.
i could have had you
against the hood of a studebaker after high school,
skirt riding up, your leg between my two,
stomach soft and warm as bread pulled out too soon,
lips the red of a ramming speed.
dearest, you're absolutely
two left feet.

i lay the children on the lawn, almost
i lay beside them.
the summer is a conclave of hydrants.
behind me, you consume a roof.
on thursday, i see you at the supermarket
in the beer and ice cream isle
hair in a kerchief, sucking an unlit cigarette
your legs a sextant
for distance, horizons, homes.

hotline

one. go to the korean market and lift a jackfruit. they will all be rotting somewhat, weeping to be carried, rolling and unappealing as guerrilla hills. the pacing man says, 'sushi, two for five' every forty-five seconds—in your head, it turns into a funny, tabulating tune for flayed sunfish, stoned tuna, real pliant crab.

____

two. sit in a warm, post-bubble bath, fresh as a roman, with the toaster next to you, if you so choose. focus on the warp of your toe-tips. embrace raisin-hood like the old, aided at the toilet by daughters. don't you feel hungrier now that you've been in the water?

____

three. laugh at a tongue stained with local berries. with less effort, watch someone laugh at a tongue stained with local berries, fruitlets picked off of the old highway route west, sun-small, you barely have to chew or swallow, they could drip through veins, drop through eyes, draw a shark's olfactory merely from shape, hue.

____

four. wash your hands in a white basin. dry your hands on a clean towel. they used to make soap from lye and animal lipids and a little crushed lilac. now it comes from aloe, wheat, coconut, stroked spaces, stones stormed for listening.

____

five. realize that everything in the world is speaking to you. the car's buckeye horn outside at the goddamn dog in the street is a cipher for you; allow it to be overhead and decoded. build altars. descend from mountains, break stones at their bases in rage. build an addition to your dining room which is a tile closet with a drain for vomiting, used to clear the stomach between grand, featherless repasts.

____

six. go to war. hold your voice over your head like a musket while crossing a river. feel genuine, cow-leather sorrow for crippled horses that you have to shoot. their skulls break like cool, larder carafes. your blood is a landlocked knot. it is not your father's, your mother's, your susceptible lover's.

____

seven. diffuse constructively. drop the hex of razors. wrap the sallow rope around your elbow, put the stool away. mend your grandfather's hand, wash your wife's foot. follow, come, be in her hymn me, be in the plum that bends like a corduroy's button, be in the traveler's burlap, the outer apple, the engorged dick, the cyclopes' cave, the spot-weld of eye contact.

____

eight. above all, you are a being of fear. there is everything to fear. how else could you not have loved? how else could you have stolen everything single-handedly with this one, villainous thought?

Hey Kylyy.
Back from Mowing the Lawn yet?

Haha, my apologies for the delay.

So, let's get going.

they will all be rotting somewhat, weeping to be carried, rolling and unappealing as guerrilla hills.

I want it closer. "they all rot somewhat" gives the same image with less words and less distance, and still fits with the tone.

Okay, okay I thought I would have more to give you. The following stanzas are perfect. Clear in the image they want to evoke, clear in the directions, clearly brilliant in the way you evoke things like "post-bubble bath", the water still soapy, but flat, and then the steam in the air as you say "roman", "cow-leather sorrow" is soft, cracked, we know how soft and worn that sorrow is.

But, okay, what are we going to do with the last two stanzas?

seven. diffuse constructively. drop the hex of razors. wrap the sallow rope around your elbow, put the stool away. mend your grandfather's hand, wash your wife's foot. follow, come, be in her hymn me, be in the plum that bends like a corduroy's button, be in the traveler's burlap, the outer apple, the engorged dick, the cyclopes' cave, the spot-weld of eye contact.


eight. above all, you are a being of fear. there is everything to fear. how else could you not have loved? how else could you have stolen everything single-handedly with this one, villainous thought?

Seven is almost fine. Seven is images and feelings less clear, more nebulous. Most of them still work. The ones I miss might work for others, but you could keep track if you'd like. I miss hex of razors, but the drop mixed with the three letter word ending in box makes me think box of razors and they clatter across the floor. Outer apple is funny because I remember when you said lower apple. Engorged dick is perfect, because you strike the right balance between elegance and well, you can't help what it is. Then I also kind of miss "mend your grandfather's hand", and the "spot-weld" almost slipped through, but if you could set up some kind of obstacle to make sure the reader lingers there, I think it would be effective to echo through the feeling of that spot weld.

And eight escapes me completely, which really upsets me, because the rest of the poem snuggles inside me perfectly, but I'm not able to grasp it completely. Maybe we can talk about it next time we pad together, but consider revealing a little more there.

Like I said, I'm in love with this one. At first you just think it's a bunch of images, but the VOICE, the speaker gives it a sense of evaluation. If the speaker tells us to do something, it's for a purpose, so as a reader we look deeper into these images for how they would affects us, rather than just passing them as pretty things. Smart choice.

<3

fight or flight

to be watched by deer
is to be warmed by velum rubbed from antlers.
i mirror stillness, and also streams
cleaving through rock
like lodes, claims. the doe
is soft as lead—i, too, could leap at any moment
snare into underbrush, bolted back
like a sour elixir.

all afternoon, i hunt bucks
to weed the forest of excess semen.
the does are like the gray capes
of fleeing maidens.
antlers prong, pry, there is a drizzle
of nodular shit—i am close.
i remember the venison yarns of whittling men,
and the gut action
to shape sticks into javelins, pikes, rupturing implements
with your leatherman or bowie
or swiss army.

as hot oil over medieval walls
so comes adrenaline.
how many bears could i clatter with
how many rivers could i ford—
the five point buck suffers from a lifetime
of tics, grinding like cyanide molars,
and wounds that could draw
a slatted tiger from neighbor continent.

every limb feels precious
i am an organism of glass and stud.
they call it hyperarousal—
i am pressed to replenish the earth
in a fugue of blood that i could leave a mile behind
or slip and stumble in
catching the buck from behind at the haunch
all of its bones collapsing
like a storybook closed, the children
already still and glowing
from love and milk and fabled woods.

worm fiddling

sixteen hearts
grunted for, like stile pearls—
i serenade with wooden stake
and iron rub, distract you
from the penitent blandness
of ossific churn, of toothsome ligament
and mineral conquest
a dirt chant pulling up through my blood as yours
taught by father's fathers
in their inscrutable bog witch charm and valley authority.
a way found up
intrepid of tunnels, roots, shelves
like a lover's shortcuts.
i fiddle for stocked lakes,
trout belly pouched
and talcum white as a queen's
second chin; you understand—
a son's first goring
the dumb wideness of the five inch bass
draped for a polaroid, lake water and bud light
boot-rubber cracked
like hermit voice, and at first
dawn's granite pools where mist has gathered
like shades summoned
by spilt blood.
i kneel and grunt, perhaps
this is how the first prayer for manna sounded
in a Florida forest, where my wife
gathers enough for this day and the sabbath
for when fishing season starts,
our rivers
full of dawdling tin Charons
having used their coin for a can of worms.
at night, i grunt along
her stakes and stumps,
knotted neath nodes, hook and gore
her eight-inch moans
feeding into deeps
what once ate at a king's bones,
and poor yorick's skull,
and a panhandle charmer of sixteen hearts
at a time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK-Oo7NwPiQ

hosanna

no one blesses anymore—
it is difficult to find a person willing
to stretch forth their hand
as if to a surface they surmise to be hot
and pronounce words
of validation, robe, and canon as confidently
as they might clarify the spelling
of their own name—
to write poetry about the ineffable blue
of a passerine's gobbled eggshell,
a color that is the crackling smokiness
of a gunshot's echo between peaks.
to permit the hand of your daughter,
to love your son's man
to be weak-kneed at canyons,
vehement rivers,
the kyrie of lightning,
draining through branches
like the discovery of a bloodclot.

i cannot blaspheme
over my own grandson's head,
my fingers knotted up in his curls
like a blind jacob
stalled in goat's hair.
my petition is that of a patriarch,
a ruler of cataracts, a cowhand
of confluences. my birthright
that of a man who has loved two women,
fought a war, stormed the world
like a boy's flathead search
for radio's function.

i name it good
i make my sign
the galaxy cavorts
swirls around my touch
like cub games.
i may, god forbid, be the last man to bless ranges,
sun-leathered skin, lamp's piety,
womb's weather,
the lion's share,
all the hopeless, hideous notions.

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FREE HORSES
52 of them
to be cut down like mast lanterns
to be run into classroom paste
to have a hand placed on the base of their neck
as if seeking the tacklebox of tied pulse
between bone & lather
really, actually, to steady the creature
before it crumples under a sound it was never broke of—
thoroughbreds, jaws big as
the sound of their own coming,
the blazonry of their hearts,
their gentleman dead & the son
wanting nothing to do with them
will send them to sugarcreek
to be a gulley of bones
led to water, made to drink
caused to return to soil exhausted of blood
& be stirred up in some saga's dustbowl
by later west-urged herds.
it used to be difficult
to kill such a large animal who'd never
gored or shredded or stung anybody—
it used to be a thing
to make a man take a seat on a boulder
& bow his head over as if what was passing
was more than a barrel's terror
but a soul alien to stalls, guns, drunk weight; native
to the soft, pungent metal of hills.
they are not old, either, some in foal, some called
yearlings, as if the cherished beasts of a calendar.
there are 52 of them.
this is your chance to hold the neck of a blaze
to slip a bit in the mouth of a prairie
to ride sidesaddle if you must
these mounts once threading down from the orient
where the gunpowder
came from too.

mother tongue

spoken over the thick corn
of the day's tamales,

the tragicomedies
of family swoons, the names of south-certain cities
from the old country

that itinerant grandfather
would produce with relish like the huffed spice
of a cigar's craft from memory's desk-deep humidor.

it is the language that your father
would love you in—a tongue of horns and tines

a tongue to call dogs or urge out jersey #42,
rapidity to stun school friends like boat-side fish,

language for the impossible moments when the brain
rides only one monorail back to a time
when every charisma was astounding.

you keep it for returns, curses, encounters with God—
a dye, a slant, a tongue loosened
like the knot in coarse hair
to accommodate the day.

a charming,
light-footed illiteracy:

to clamber among some other home's words
unconcerned of their middle-centuries or consul prefixes,
like june-dark boys shrieking over the boulders
of many soundless, uninterpreted millennia—

these cedillas and strains
and ligatures;
the times when all re-routings
and translations upbraid you and you react only

with a pre-babel gesture or sob.