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08.16.07
Three Poems
Combs

Comb the chrysalis from your beard to fasten the milkweed
Rather your eyes be matted with Queen Ann’s lace than pill blisters scatter the sink

We hesitate and falter 
Have tried to bathe in a sink instead of the lake

I have not given in completely am not yet preserving only the land

The rest of it or the rest
Which is the false stillness of matter
Hold these atoms for me while I swipe the last dish from the sink

We take bird dishes to the woods and paint them hanging from trees
We will break the pattern sob

The only dangerous beard belongs to the dead
Comb out haphazard need

When we climb
out of the flowerpot our roots are numb for the first six steps



 



When You Press a Button on My Side, a Tall Door Opens

My youth goes to the matinee on Saturday afternoons
Tactic cards add little to the otherwise clean and elegant game

Take advantage of what looks up with interest and waits
Little figures of prospects dry with too much civility

Fingernails buffed by handguns primp into the carriage window
Design a problem practice can take care of

A barbeque war and heritage mining sessions
Obedience since we entered the gun

You press for a provocative portrayal of remorse
We hope to find the tall door framing a recovery cursed with artwork

Submissive grief noticed by a curtsey
And with no objection the carriage drove off



 



She Is Humanly Plain

As touch I creep around the wild geese
and take to distance with no such safety roof

There are no guidelines for your unreachable beard

Your cap keeps rolling to my corner tree
and I hold it here though you refuse to retrieve

She is humanly plain and you let her in
She takes to distract with veins growing the wrong way

A subject you could not mention before me
The distance choir and anchors hanging from two chins

I train only to request what can be given

The geese sleep in dried grass below my tree-house
and keep one gosling in your cap