A fish doesn’t need a bicycle she said
What do you mean by fish I riposted

We saw a root protrude from the ground
And could not tell which tree had sent it out
So distant is the little scrap of forest
That backs up to the yard

They say the surface is a mirror
The roots replicating exactly
The extent of the spreading branches
Though unseen by us who tread above

With what force a tree drives itself
With what determination
Shoving aside all resistance
From the solid ground

And in its journey
At least in our slim sample
The root had lost all character
Of oak or beech or sweetgum

And we spoke of our perplexity
Of cause and shape and what and how
The great root spoke to us
In unintelligible sentences

Are any impressionists extant
The pavement decays the pavement decays and crumbles
Lesser notes arise to fill that portion of a substance that nature abhors
Bicyclists in the gutter disclaim their entitlement
New ceremonies of reassurance arise
A long-haul trucker aloft and comprehensive
Humblebrags the advent of strategic efficiency
The circumscription of festive mammillary flowers
He waives the recipes and stops on a dime

Do not question my output the candidate insists
Geronimo and Hit the dirt
Square pegs round holes and knightly evasions
Take a left at the next boulevard
Past the dreamy villas
Past the dilapidated noviciate
Over the viaduct that traverses the pit
Until you reach the emporia of groovy vibes and hidden agendas

There is a kind of freshness in exhaustion
Energy in lassitude
Beauty in extreme old age
The brain supplies geometric diversions
Upon the simple closing of the eyes
The brain supplies the missing pieces
Hence the myth of the prophetic ulna

The epic mural gets it wrong
The field marshall is never in the van
Long worms or were they sour lines of verse
Commemorate that sin which the moon
Duly constituted representative
Has pledged to consign to unhallowed ground
How dare one ask she sings with indignation rising
What another sees much less how
And castigates the vogue for lacking sorrow

The tyrant and his yes men advance their confections
Their own swirling medley of synesthetic tenders
Documents in triplicate and juridical burlesques

In a plot of beech oak sweetgum and pine
A dead sweetgum stands tall as its neighbors
Though riddled with invertebrate excavation
The dust of its diminishment heaped about its base

It gives forth no leaf
Nor none of the little maces trodden underfoot
Its bark flakes its pith wastes
Never to serve as canopy or commodity

The antique pen was fashioned of wood
Its later version of wood veneer
A subsequent imitation of wood-grain polymer
Engineered compound of petroleum product

But the rock-oil itself volatile mineral
Owes its being to vegetable reactions
And we burn the remnants to steal their storage
Of life and food and heat from the sun

But here the theft was for organic molecules
And cellulose is a polymer too so what’s the difference
The pen crumbles the carbon chain slips
That the tree stands however briefly is a miracle

The sweetgum was young when it died
As slender as two hands in a ring
A nominal pause in advance and decline
Flesh is as grass and the world is as dust

Many of the appurtenances in our hospitable land
Frightened the man on the ambassadorial mission
The temperature the venomous serpents the stinging plants
But none so much as the roaring cicada
Mating cry of course
The sound he found unpleasant
But the ubiquity of it the inevitability
Discomposed the envoy most of all
Nevertheless in his diplomatic tact
He distinguished for us an offense
Of merely environmental etiology
From one that issued from the mind of man
And how reprobate would such a mind have to be
To assail the sensibility of so gentle a guest
And yet in his disclosure his forgiveness of nature
He discloses further matter
That there are crimes that warrant consideration as crimes
And thus warrant consideration of sanction punishment or worse
Acts not of nature acts not of God
But acts committed by his beloved humanity
Representative of the old world he turned around
At some point he departed for a welcome return
Now surely in the ancient kingdom of his birth
Certain accidental accessories would have disturbed the composure
Of a sojourner from precincts now near at hand
But what of us who are left behind
Who cannot estrange ourselves from the cicada’s threat
Already so long-familiar
Is it our doom to be cradled forever
In the homely hominid brawl
Having forsaken our arboreal homeland
Yet never to have departed from the plains of Laetoli

How comforting to heed the logical limit
Of objects at which you can shake a stick
Regrettably all too often exorbitant boluses
Transgress the inevitable perimeter

How comforting to heed the logical proscription
Against certain objects’ holding candles to certain other objects
And nobody troubles about the terms’ consent
They seem so like objects compact and entire

Psychoanalytic explanations obtain
And explanations phylogenetic biophysical or politico-economic
You can’t lose except by remaining silent
But how to explain the lone rider’s compulsion to speak

I registered to lose by default and I was glad to do it
Not every wry-necked lamb is a victim of indisposition
Or even so some grow up to be Richard III
The terrifying spectacles the demonstrations of inanity
I was fascinated by their shards their topology
Their modularity
You had me at spectacles I’ve always been a railroad buff
Willfully oblivious to the cost of ballast
Some people devote their lives to abstraction
Renouncing the vital importance of fish and bicycles
Others derive contentment by weeping into their corn flakes
I do not fear vacancy lacking as I do a frame of reference
Every book has its gutter
Every rhapsody its diaphragm
Why await the second coming of ecstasy-without-horror
They don’t build motorcycles in Denver
Nor First Communion outfits in Nantucket
It was autumn early November
The driblets hung upon the eaves
Everywhere was felt the ambience of mingled expectancy and regret
The flocks of blackbirds dwindled
A voice sang strange modal plaints high-pitched but not shrill
The tertiary economy seemed so wan that day
So estranged from the hard facts of groceries and overcoats
I too fell into the lull lubricious equivocal static and covert
When it gets like this I always resort to the middle way
As the inner ear defines equilibrium
I’m not proud but old habits are hard to break
The categories of the understanding are not optional
And foveal concentration is corralled in vitro
I resolved to have my wiper blades checked
To refer to the specifications in the preface
But why assume that there’s a story
And I did in fact manage to see to it that the deterrents were expunged
But such is the fate of policies of incentive and disincentive
One casts a wary eye until the familiar Nemesis intervenes
I said You had me
Where have they flown the thief exclaimed
A little late it turned out
Where do good platelets go when they die
If you lived here you’d be home now
I have more memories

Investigate the substance of a fallen tree
And you might happen upon a beetle grub
That feasts upon the giant’s decay
It’s easy to catalogue the visible features
The round head of varnished mahogany with its hard alien eyes
The crescent white abdomen
Translucent to reveal the brown intestinal sac
The tiny bristles
The six legs emblem of the insect brand
But how to account for the horror the monster evokes
Science accounts for surfaces
Even internal surfaces so to speak
And the worm’s immature exterior already bespeaks the habits
Customary among the animalia
Science allows the cheerful to sing
Everything is beautiful in its own way

And then you begin to detect the signs
Transmitted from who knows where
That announce the transit into nightmare
A tingling of the extremities
A whiff not quite ozone not quite kerosene
The recuperating neighbor swaths of countenance sacrificed to surgery
Armies of rapists mounting their invasions
The suicidal fighter planes
Nature’s concert of earthquake tornado predation fire and flood
The schoolyard bully causing injury and making no demands
Newborn babies roasted on spits
The great wheel of growth death and insatiable larval growth

Many of my classmates were hellions
And I yearned to join their lusty tribe
But we all of us I supposed suffered ravenous curiosity
As to the nature and origin of sin
Thus we questioned our teacher of religion
Himself of the laity and no expert
And were dismayed to find his vocabulary
Little ampler than our own
Does this act or that thought qualify as sin we inquired
That’s not the point he would insist
Disappointed more with his own incapacity
Than with our patent lack of imagination
Everyone among us I supposed was perfectly aware
Of malefactions commercial vehicular and interpersonal
But one sin lay veiled in silence behind our shame
As if each of us already knew its vileness before man and God
And each must suffer its delights and torments alone
Perhaps I was more cognizant than others
To see the inward act as more damning than the outward
For I knew myself more than damned
For wishing my polluted thoughts incarnated
In matter more substantial
Than a schoolboy’s simulacrum
Many years since I heard the wisdom
Though cowed by its fearful modality
That ought implies can
And who can prevent the acts
That condense in the mind from the mere body’s distillery
But other sins equally irresistible have gathered
In that Cartesian charnel house
The sheol of the mind
One ought not to be bored in this world
Of impossible suffering and impossible wealth
But who can sustain a posture of ravenous yearning

The lightest gust sets their trunks a-swaying
One green hue never not even from afar
The stiff the needled and the willowy
Leaves bicolored when the wind moves among them
All distinguish themselves or rather
Give themselves unto distinction
Even in their times of dormancy

The Standards Board prohibits angular projections
It’s a beef therefore to parse my earliest memories
Chess for example evinces subterfuge
What they call a spanner we call enlightenment

My uncle was a better dry cleaner than I
I can vaguely perpetrate his arrival at the gates of Salerno
Site of the cannery and of traumatic brain injury
My stitching and unstitching fall a little short

It’s never a simple matter of unmotivated pool shots
Nor of settling accounts with a slipstick
A uniformed schoolgirl stacking the aphorisms
A priest releasing the lasso

Possessive with the gerund you dolt
The commission prohibits peering above the transom
The reef is deadly but beautiful
How did they do that trick with the traffic cop

The assessments are wildly disorganized
A poodle imitates a pear
Salesmen’s wives apply calipers to printed circuit boards
Wild swans negotiate the battlements

Regulations prohibit allusion to the Eiffel Tower
The conjunction belongs in the next echelon they say
But Frederick Douglass is more than an assemblage
A pistol more than merchandise

Will somebody please catalogue these receipts
The albatrosses the colorful neutrinos
Will somebody help that man with the twisted neck
Never mind his attempt to scoot in an Alfa Romeo

I want to divest myself
But I’ve forgotten the decrypter
I’ve inscribed a million signatures
Daily riposted a ten-foot sphynx

I want to tour the shores of Illyria
To see the immemorial portico
To engage the factors of the digital drive
I’ve always wanted a real cape to fly with

A young wastrel died unremembered
Or in memory lasting but as long as the flames
24 FPS is an illusion
Men in overcoats smuggle medication

Like printed fields overlain with gestural paint
The forests of symbols lie within the temples
She asked but deflected the propositions
You don’t look for the absence of traffic cones
It just comes to you
She jacked the prettily purloined
She sealed the monstrous reticule
That she had won in the DOT raffle

They don’t fold these things on television
They don’t detach them from the hospitals
Rabbits and termites ingest their appointed burrows
As a lemur allows to escape its inveterate yawp
Or a distributor its formalities

The smokers my people assemble on the patio
You don’t look for the absence of enjambment they grumble
The nation is seized by a mania
Checking for pain in the lymph nodes

She bemoans the decay of the serviette
Surely he must have meant the objective world
The sounds are confounded the words confused
Surely he meant

For Jason Thibodeau

The nothing of the jug
The nothing of the window
Are said to make the window and the jug

The scar beneath his chin
Where at the age of five
He struck the side of the swimming pool

The more abstract concavity
Evident in the remodelling
Of the jugular foramen

The residence elsewhere of the father
Occasioned by his career
In some distant city

The baleful knowledge
Of a million prohibitions
Against for example self-pity

The Tables of the Law
The recipes for self-improvement
Hiatus in the manuscript

How would it be if scavengers
Never dismembered the corpse
Saprophytes from Arlington to Thermopylae

Niagara the Grand Canyon
The ordinary sunset
Scooping beauty from decline and fall

Words color the interstices
Mark the dim fringes
And never fill them full