Nathan Bartel
As for you, my friends, I think I have,
I think IÕve cranked over many cruxes
& seen a face cleft there distinctly one
of yours,
my friends. Are you listening?
Pulled from the swamp cisterns & from the
foam assembly
& the embarrassing sisters & your
libations
& their contexts, one of you crushes
in the hybridized nectarines of holiness,
one of you is shade for what I have,
or more a screen, as the eagles & shad
come to terms in abandoned root cellars
& jam closets, sometimes itÕs just
bursting,
there on the far duskline sky,
but my little niece cries. IÕm voting her for president.
When I told you I would sketch you from memory
I told you I would sketch your memories.
One is a bougainvillea.
One is an unbelievable underwater edible
hydrangea.
The plasticbag kids the sleepy
kids praying to an insidious oak
noon
the spoonlike midsummer, bees
buzzing above the busted moon roof
& city a grey puss-filled blister
glossed in the sunÕs soliloquy. Soleil
canÕt know a treeÕs embrace
is the comfort of these revisiting
spit in a plastic bottle
in the cycle
where smoke is amenÕs second syllable
Scan the index
keep conditioning
& park down the way a little. ArenÕt we still rapt
by cicadas asks one
in the water: scrap says blue cement
Slurpents, friends
of rogue icebergs
& tutors to honeydews on methods of green
sweetness, in late afternoon light
motes of scorched intelligence sifting from
our follicles
pause for a moment en masse
like a creature in the doorway (if youÕve seen
that movie
Pose is a condition, we learn
to recognize a shape, lift our noses
from the Sudafed for an hour maybe, maybe half
the day
Isolated thunderheads doddering
lobotomized into the electric fence
of Lawrence
The party takes a breather before atomizing
into randomized desire
The Chamber of Commerce sucks its hangnail
We have read Coleridge so we know how good
blood tastes when you kiss it
Across the block the
breeding stock tapped
for artifice of security actually just wants
to play & be fed
regularly