Effluvium Landscape: of Cows as a First Form of Currency to Retribution


The problem with blacktop
is its coefficient of friction, its grind sound.
Cars pass the cows and the cows keep chewing,
sky's overcast assembled on an antique loom
of bare trees.

A wrench in the mud. A boy loosens
planks for salamanders.
Of an afternoon, the odor of geraniums or manure
offer opposite posterities.
Live in a repository of everyone broke for a while
and a coat hanger becomes the letter f

with its arms threshed off, any threadbare breeze
an ancient and ringing deflation.

Springtime, the hospital's inundated.
Summer, listening to the cicadas
is an almost mystical form of surgery done to you.
We are scars to prove.



It Is Hard to Believe in the Soul


The little hairs in the lungs rust.
It is hard to imagine wind.
What is emptiness? A flower?
Whosoever's body is flush with the world is a god.

Where water pools in the shade your reflection trembles.
The woman on the balcony, you imagine her from yesterday.
Vines spill from banister to cement and you swear

the baby's eyelashes are silk, the river
tons of horsehair at once.
If anything, the soul is a series of invisible arches, mass
without weight, the smallest sense of moon-colored fortitude.

A ladder reaches the roof and keeps going.
The woman, she believes she is bread.
You too believe you are bread, that if anything
the flower is born inside out.

In the mind wild grasses pant and fold.
The broken colloquy of a hammer, thirst of trees
in your blood. The blue thread
you ease from your shirt to stitch air to air.