>Key is justify nothing &
I’ve learned from living here
Harden yourself but don’t
Be bull-headed, I know poetry
& my art will spit in yr face
Surprise! It’s poison! Or
It drips. Either accomplishes
My task: I know pantoum,
Villanelle, sonnet-sad phrases
I know Ms. Dog, blood running
From her fingertips, jumped
To her death to save her art
Which is not my art.
Most, Anne included, do not make it
Over the ledge
Without a field of daffodils
Filled with cotton gloves
For real
The only thing
Worth dreams
Is brick
Stacked
Snake-high
Over the river.
That’s a wall, That’s a bridge
If
A cigar can be a cigar
Then
Anything at all can be a wall
Logic and ledges meet here, where
Ill-tipped teeth scoff at common parlance
Knocking fingers idolized in railcars
In hollow things floating down stream
The black kid beating the sugary silence with his lips.
Here the dream meets what it is not
And the wall is just a ledge
Again
The flowers are yellow there and there
And there, but not
And
I don’t remember anything rhyme
Where did, what did mother teach?
There is no reason to spit
May I call this afraid?
My back to the washed cave wall
Here there are no drawings or songs
Cities or falls, there are daffodils implied
Just inside the suns comport
But
The meaning of pastoral, ode wanders
That we unlearn
and that and that, that
Our heads swing wildly
Again
Beasts beyond chalky thought
We emerge hot and fast, redouble
Our thousand eyes blast the horizon
Cracking, baked beasts
Ledgeless & so far from Anne, now
Mired in an hour of night
We dare not describe thick, scum-like
The river beside out home does not replenish
It is a bridge, it is a wall, it is a bridge
It is the many hands of a friend, it is
toe-to-heel, toe-to-heel, it is curling
about the bed we share, just once for an old friend
and then, head swinging wildly, shakes off a dream.