from “Figures of Speech”
inside the Time Machine is
it sorrow or joy across
distances I find little minutia
candles and candle wax melted
on green Jaeger bottles lowkey
banter of men watching golf
two days after the world
president demanded mineral thanks and
Mom remembers in me DNA
is a helix entanglement or
what they call code I
dislike metaphors usually it’s like
drones on the winter horizon
dead hostages and local election
skewed to the worst asshole
candidate of blind attention bearing
our bodies to each other
figurative destiny it doesn’t matter
except in relation when I
wept in mom’s lap when
uncle John died hot July
highway his heat in her
memory to her child I am
alive in wide external making
*
art is mystery artifice form
relies on external witness to
meet what words act as
if equivalence sutured this life
crow’s view into trees barren
dark of self my wit
slow but earnest in the
mean of my people ghosts
who whistle through my desire
the figure is sound and
image and the touch and
smell of material pain this
earthly paradise I so insist
to carry the motion of
textures blended in half memory
of maternal circumstance no one
knows where a poem goes
it’s our family to arrange
what I meant when I
speak a phantom voice a
spectral cloud closes on horizons
her eyes ears nose mouth
inconnu stepping into this matter
of mobility under live oaks
breaking light into local varieties
and so burden the irretrievable