Loco
If titmouse wags her song at me again like a scolding
finger—you-loco—
I aim to pop her,
then lie down among the cows and rusting tractors along the
creekside,
frigid,
while the bull soliloquizes like widower Macbeth.
For the milk of human kindness doth flow
from mine ears
and I have murderous thoughts
against myself
because I didn’t grieve you better.
If that same murder of crows bobs the back field in their
blackcoats
like a convention of metaphysicians
muttering Kant-kant-kant-kant,
I’ll give them one barrel of heaven, the other
hell.
My buck fawn’s back legs yodel through the early morning
plenary,
my buck fawn runs their arguments reductio
loco. His tongue shinnies up their one-eyed sunflower
stalks,
his back talk pins their heavy-headed
arguments to the ground.
Come winter I’ll eat my own hands before those oily axioms
touch my mouth.
If bobwhite calls her lover’s name in her sleep at dusk,
reminding me, again, I’m loverless, lonesome
as a criminal past, well, then—
what? Make another meal of self-pity?
Oh World, blow your noise through the keyhole of me,
so when Night walks by on its tip-toes with
its ear to the wall of my bedroom
let it hear the loco-commotion
of the bus stop at five-fifteen on any
Friday afternoon.
I have a crazy angel in my throat.
She grabs sorrow by the ankles, swings it
round,
round in my mouth,
until it’s a tale of childish fury,
signifying the best it can—
a fluster of wings in the chimney, ashes
sassing.
Blood bird,
my bird, she eats the ashes;
these ashes are enough.
Source of the text – Deborah Slicer, the white calf kicks.
Pittsburgh: Autumn House Press, 2003, p. 3-4.
TJB: Angry at birds. The long-lined semi-sonnet, with Shakespearean-natural images, threatens violence of the little bird-poems the poet invokes.
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