The work tastes overwhelmed, like alert palms flanking a full highway.
How you find the grit later in your mouth & wake into
your own enormity. How the work takes an unexpected amount of right turns
that run into the darkness & peter out under abandoned bridges.
To the Massachusetts from which I come, my brother-country racked by cobblestones
that left me sprained, I leave my brain
infused with slick bottom stones where three rivers converge. Men in hip-boots
pull breaching trout from the surface.
The work is as barbarous as bookends. Waterspouts deviated by a tough wind,
as if we could jump up into our wings, hold a pitch to the point of ownership
& scatter as sure as light.
Though I was willingly broken by the grandeur, I made not one exception,
too taken by a trumpet taking stabs at Gershwin, the faults repeats passing
in on a breeze. Yet I was often awakened by a horrid kind of surprise
into my primary image (a small brook that borders a deaf school).
Having worked a summer holiday for belladonna, I thought my sight was proof.
I believed all the endings curved into the choirmaster's slender fingers
which formed a closed circle against the darkened faces of the crowd.
Yet I stared at a map for a year & could only remember the colors of countries.
The work followed me like the carcasses of road-kill I counted while passing
through Colorado. Two days in, the toll mounted to unhumorous heights. 284
was lifted from the asphalt by a hawk just before the grill of the car. The work
was like that, both skyward and lifeless.
