Got behind the mule this morning
and plowed until it bent me
until I rained into loose soil
But for the life of me I couldn’t
get up this morning, sleep across
my face, filling my mouth
I’m pretty sure I must be dead
The connection fades in and out

I’m pretty sure I’ve slipped somehow
into the earth, its dusky hips
At night we smeared our lenses
with impossible thumb prints of jelly
and sometime while out you showed me
the imprint of your hand on my shirt
in semen

I’m pretty sure the cat is anxious because
it senses that my soul is in jeopardy

he fades in and out like a ghost
The way fingers wear away the faces on coins

for Lindsay

My sturdy farm girl bursts from our bed
like bamboo water overflowing plastic
My studly badminton partner missed again
the serve I can’t seem to return to
I rise from her wetlands, slathered in kudzu

milk another man’s cow with crow’s etiquette
After a year of almost being still, or
faster than

My prurient migrant advances over checks
I stand around a lot, conversing with myself
in a landscape wilted with sonnets and germs
I’ve been studying corrosion

but this isn’t quite what I read about
My rusty trombone a surgery in amber

for Lindsay

A gaggle of ruffled and white ladies
roll among them the constituents of symphony
as we huddle into each other on
the opera house balcony

changing an entity of one data type
into another
I’ll feel a little jealous later on
but this is the good part
He asks how the music supports its own weight
and we want to listen to it
They can shape shift, and are usually mischievous,
and even dangerous
like the dark canal of your cleavage

in that low shirt
Later on we will make love
slowly, without duration
All my urgency distilled

but right now we face Haydn
the father of the symphony, the father
of the string quartet
I am the father of the palace roses
and encompass nine semitones
and trace these abstract clusters of catgut
until all my lovely maps askew

She sleeps with magic’s rationalism, games entwined
in her pretty black head, a smear of salt–

needs to be held, and you need to let her
bite: over your pectoral, with a sickle of need-red,

like a sympathetic cord, all the notes splayed out on
the table, without the InnoDB storage engine–

this is the sleep in her, a raw rise of blankets, unmuzzled–
she darted off your venn diagram, pointillizing in the intersection;

in her head she too is in a dark corner, hunched over some bones;
she too wanders from the fire

for Lindsay

Plush butter toy, the sulfur inflected
ceaseless and soliloquized quaint fingernails
pushing back my cuticle, along a thickness
of bites—Imma wash out your mouth

with a press release, swollen with the season
we discussed romanticism in a dark car on
the seneca reservation, plugged into reverb–
in the pulp of ancient ivy our spines turn to

sanity, our pupils diaphanous, larval
among tessellated cocoons—I’ve come
to know a variety of the maps you stick to
your face, honey bunz, and that you would eat naan

shooting down your dainty hand an explosion
of skullcap, of wormwood, of ache water