The White Wish
For charity, she huddles by the grooved track
rating the speed of the truck; mare’s
tails rase the screen, while her eye drops
fuel in the gaping bed of yellow rape
and its cobalt border that swims with estrangement.
Within a bank of weeds cold as snapped beans, each
digit of its advance tipped with polar green, her hand
must dry and whiten in his hand. The rampant manger
where the slope is bound, by the chrome-white of the
river arch, feeds her from his palm turning to bone in her
loving. Brown-out of traffic, the manor grays and curls,
both above and within the weed a change to latency:
to fear in bitten molars the white latch of the gate,
the spasmodically textured countryside, washing a
corpse’s mania for many splashes of place in white
fluid pouring from the statue of his horse.
My attachment dissipates like the v on a river.
Panning a square plot of blood with seaweed
delivers corn clusters of odorous hardness.
In pinafore swung mulched pockets over three
periods of day: flashy morning, a hard hot rod
skewering the stomach; roseate day, peed on the reading rug
with a shy skirt at prayers and swinging out in the lunch
yard; night’s untrammeled magnet, gleaming outward into space
like a sword. How gravely rubbed, these stones,
manky with jewels of colored paper, in my guilt of memory,
how wished for the white dress of the queen of god.
Overhung cotton candy pinks against candy fir,
a horizon of light dims the supine beds and canes, dip
by dip withdrawing sensation. Currents of oared air
ignore skin on the face that focus tightens.
The myops can get correction by suture to standard
parallax: bare incision of the duck tail in fragrant
water laps an area in all known time. Every year one
abandons for cash and plans the veil of formality,
as it is known in the younger body, as it encircles
the memory of a former body. Paler hair on my nipples,
crook sharps, and cotton brush; romance in bed,
when the sword flashed vacantly across the glass.
At day end, exclusion from the trench of real
seriousness clacks harness-bells, and vitriol hurry
is unharbored for sweet remorse: the barrel flowered.
Spring declines on work; fingerpad unearths a play
stove and its terra utensils, caked with investment
in real seriousness. I pitch another claim on my bowels,
learn to restrain impulses and homestead my corpse;
always as, as formerly I swung the stench away,
though now am less entrenched in it as form of focus
on sweetness and delay. At any time it is mine.
What was, lost. How my vocation hummed was first lost;
then confusion of wine with blood burns; a walking
rhythm buzz which first heard sound in snow then
stumbled in the cup of my hand. Will breath be next,
the sharp indraw which cuts its bland incision on smoked
teeth, yes it will, the body who claims it drains already
demoted lees. Thought cocks its rubber arrow
toward the staggering calf, sudden cramps asleep
demonstrate the dissipation of mnemonic pain.
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