My love sends instant
messages while she works:
“I hope the reader
might surface from
a sea of paper.
I lost the cable too, but it
has just emerged—
along with a packet of tissues,
a lip salve & a hair comb—
from beneath an
ancient layer on
my desk.”
Five minutes later:
“No reader yet, but
two keys, three
xd memory cards,
Because the electric guitar had no hole,
in the middle of a song
the old bluesman lowered his mouth to it
& plucked the strings with his gold-
capped teeth.
Because the sawhorse had no head,
it didn’t know which way to run
when a plank saddled it,
& it let the saw whinny
for both of them.
Because the hermit had no wife,
he bought a clock
with a loud tick
& wound it faithfully once a week
with a little brass key.
Because the trailer had no cellar,
While she talks on the phone,
her blue pen seems to have
a life of its own,
makes abstract flowers
& filigree
& Gordian knots
all around the list of birds seen
on her morning walk.
I watch fascinated
as I eat my allotted three
fresh peanut-butter cookies,
each bearing the print of a fork’s
uncomplicated foot.
(Lens culinaris)
Until the lentil lent
its Latin name, the lens
went unknown among us,
despite being the apple
of our eyes. Now it is
the legume that lags
in popularity:
we’re more apt to wonder
what microscopic folk
might be peering blindly
up from the soup,
& suspect every
lenticular cloud
of hiding a flying saucer
from the distant bulging disc
To be small is to be distant
& vice versa.
The asterisk calls.
It leaves a message.
You turn it all the way up:
it sounds like a small fan.
In some parallel universe
all the stars look like this
& books with too many footnotes
collapse into black holes.
Is it or isn’t it?
The sugar pill isn’t saying.
The line that bisects it
was intentionally left blank.
It’s a go sign, perhaps,
or a one-bead rosary.
Its zero gives birth
to all other numbers.
Since opposites attract within
bounds of reason & good breeding,
it must be in love
with a salt tablet.
It can be anything
the salt wants,
including another condiment
that cures vagueness.
Thorn begins with thorn,
a dead letter from
the Old English alphabet.
It’s an aborted branch,
a weaponized nipple. It draws blood
instead of expressing sap, Mother
Nature red in tooth & claw,
rose-hipped or hawed.
But of course it doesn’t bother the bees,
for who needs a needle
to thread the seamless labyrinth
of the rose?
A male hummingbird
circles the metal pink
flamingo in my garden,
circles & touches it
with its all-purpose bill.
Amazed? Perplexed?
Combatative? Appalled?
The sun sinks behind
the trees & the first
katydids start calling
as the hummer zips
in for a landing on
the single rusty leg,
perching sideways
just below the tail,
& taps the pink wing
Persistence pays:
I once saw a pheasant just
where the stone dog points.
Jot or tittle?
Eye or eye-drop?
Hole or window?
Explain.
Make yourself
uncomfortable.
What is it?
How many legs does it have?
Is it woody or chitinous?
You are a cat.
No, not you—
you are nothing like a cat!
Help us find the cat.
What would you tell time?
What would you read to books?
Invent a ceremony for
Prawns or shrimp? The cat likes them
either way. We find him on the counter
with a large piece of red onion
& a lettuce leaf in his mouth, a sudden
fan of salads. The cat is a true eccentric
& quite sure he is a dog, while
the dog of course thinks she is
a human. And we humans are the most
curious of all: we believe
we are what we eat, though it’s seldom
that we’re present for the eating.
If we eat a salad, we’re already looking
forward to the dessert. Omnivores,
dwellers in the benthic zone, we have
an unusual tolerance for toxins.
Our strongest muscles pull us rapidly
I am untroubled by serpents
or the marinated feet of pigs.
I bear no antipathy toward bears
or the bees they bedevil,
& the devil never tempts me
to any evil I can’t invent on my own
(forgive me if I don’t delve into the details).
What makes me break down is a banjo,
lonesome as our only god the clock
but with two hands, both of them fast.
Looking in its open back
can be disconcerting: What makes it go?
There’s nothing but a bare rod
& the smell of rain.
Where’s the balance wheel?
The escapement?