They just keep floating

They just keep floating
up, she said,
my shoulders, as he tied the bikes
to the winter fence. I want to make them
stop,
floating up, and all this hurting that is hardly
there but it is always,
dullness tightness hurt.

He took a jug from the back of
the bikes, it was a jug of water. I want to go back
to before this
film was on every thing where
did this film come from, she said, she was
sick there was a gritty grey oil on
the way she saw things. He ground up

the thistle, the tart cherry, the bergamot into the jug,
he took a cat out of the satchel and sat her down. All
this world now is
sick, I feel sick on the skin, my eyes
are dirty, where is the old world, something's
not right, somthing's
not

right and I don't know when it started, she
said. He sat her down, he put the cat behind her
back, he put the cat in the small of her back like a little blanket,
he stirred up the mixture in the jug. I need it

I need
to get back
she said and he poured the jug
all over her head.

The Birthing House

We don't get older, we just
get more detailed. Grandma

eats a small lighthouse made of taffy.
James paints a bottle-shape onto the window --

it fills with rain. With holograms of foam
wrapping around the loch's ledge,

inside the birthing house we wait
for your landing. This is from where

you'll see orange palms in the box-bay,
where one mirror reflects dogs

the same dogs can't stop
sniffing. Evening is squirrels dragging

strings of bulbs through the brocade; is
Harry in a handstand behind the map-shed,

his basket of rainbow-trout punching the air
with its giant fist of stink. Later,

when you put on that carved-head-of-bear
in your dreams, or find pickled

kale makes you salivate, know that
it's for the latitude of this hill

that your blood-sap aches.
Kerosene bottles lite on the dry-dock.

Bunk beds in the owl's lungs;
the dull lamp of cat-sleep.

Claymation of Cavemen

A claymation of cavemen whirling under our eyelids,
& minerals sewn into both of our nostrils, we wedded

ourselves by the flag of invention
near the piney rec-area of Egg Harbor School.

In a lighthouse's forehead we lived among beacons.
We preformed small, meditative tasks there:

each calculiptical adgrain of the moon,
I poured a dish of stars in his mind --

After you were born, we tooks tours through your presence,
gulping your haze like an elixer of worlds.

Where did you come from, I wanted to know,
imagining a gravestone. A drum-head of ferns.

What kind of animals? How far did your hands go? You said
Calm down. Put one stone on

another stone. You said: up from my heart
I thought of my head, and my heart came true.

TREE-VISION

Give Ebenezer a gristmill ring on his thumb.
Tie up his shirt with a piece of his
shirt. What does he see behind the cat-tails? Be gentle.
Sounds of pounding in the distance. Ebenezer come

from the river to meet us; speaks from the shapes in
a marbled disk: “Unfold the power of tree-vision:
how the fox’s fur sees more than the fox. How
one skunk fights its own reflection on a hillock:
the bear-cub revolving in the hemlock's

constellation.” Beneath the concrete clouds
where we stand, a worm carries grist on its conveyor
of skin. The 1807 handbill on the bridge-post reads
“Do you hear that Pounding?”

MAKING MEDICINE

The shovel is a bubble in the ground near Talissian.
His body a banquet of sunshine in this shovel.

It reminds him of how his body dragged ten-thousand
ancestors through dusk-rot while reaching this place:
Sky cloaked on Firs Phen Eugepei's shed.

He is telling his ancestors "See, a now is a now:
Be now veined-curtain or prism or screendoor. Be now
hummingbird that turns from us, weaving
though the yard."
& they follow the hummingbird to the feed cans.

Meanwhile, Firs Phen shows him a marble she's found
in the fern-brake, full of radar, foggy with spell.

His body moves his hand down to it.
(Sometimes his mind clenches but not yet.)
In his other hand: a magnifier. This will be medicine

> of building bundles in the forest's slight itch of burr,
> of waiting until the bubble blips from the rainbowy soil,
> of letting the marble recognize itself in his lifetime.

For it is said: he picks the marble up.

WHERE FIRS PHEN EUGEPAI SILVIORUM LIVES

Mouse down into that gully wode --
under conifers shouldering conifers:

• she's boiling ginseng in a hubcap
• Firs Phen Eugepai Silviorum

and if you look at a trail like blood, (isn't), see:

1. Smoke wallpapering the elm's pallet violet.
2. Binary sunlight in slanted beakers of copse.
3. Her roof made from the hood of a V6 Viper and floorboards,
4. Her hut a stand of blossoming hemlocks.

Fifteen miles east is the Steamboat Landing...but

Firs Phen's got something she's stirring and she stirs it with a garden
gnome and even though it looks like she's boiling the gnome whole...
she turns, says "It is day 19." Hands you

• an upside-down helmet full of acorn brew. Later,
• when you finally see the daguerreotype

of all of this happening -- yes,
those are lucent lines, etched from your crown to sky.


____________________

KIDHOOD WATCH

In the neighborhood, old, soaked with budding burgundy --
where Darren's blind mother pitched slow balls to us
on Friday the 13th -- I once saw the treeline inching in.

Born from a frightening decade of hairy men, mayham,
I took a kid's note of every frightening thing:

a portrait in the neighbor's upper hallway touched me;
my skinned knee watched a man crushed in a movie;
grandmother in the clawtub; brother's eye.

Something told me God was deep in basement --
and if I descended wrongly, he'd make my hands bleed.

So'd cover my hide with numbers, burdock, with plucked honey-
suckle, counting. I took up football helmets. Designed
a mechanical horse with three different speeds: that imaginary

enemies couldn't poison me. Through pathways gnarled with willows &
pumpkins, crept my quiver and bow, my shoulders and toes.

_____________________