Sawdust. This picture of a bird belongs to someone else. If it belongs to you, please claim it.

For the ghost of John with no skin on

Let this be a truce with a folded field,  a handshake with light

Calico, tweed, the bubbling pots. I’m a long way from home

From “St. Francis and the Sow” by Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow

AMERICA!

 

dear mistar, these calico brains: rām rām wish for you! home ek, do, tīn, chār,

taxidermy school:          wedding parties, kitten measurements

to sleep

All that is solid,

House, 1993. Concrete, life-sized.

black swallowe (chiasmodon niger)

 if the stomach expands three times its size, maybe then it creates its own light