Sonnets

Countdown to divorce in snowy January.
So much friction to apply like brakes on spinning tires,
sleds called torpedos. A bankup of ice chunks and snow hunks
keeps sleds from grating on aqueducts where the road
humps under the slope. Snowboard kid dives off as board
continues trajectory into harm. He rolls and bounces,
board rolls and bounces. Sharp crystalline spray wet with melt,
wet with what snow is made from. Gravel and slush mix.
President proposes job training for non-exist-
ent jobs, non-existence training. Get used to it, get used to ice
implanted granular in the wimpled skin of the winter wild
a coat on the riot of grass, and weeds sere and stalk.
Some birds flew from one wire to the next under a low
cloud ceiling, no zoo. Grey lid of sky which is sometimes open vast


Because you work hard you’re not good enough
to beat the Italian who handles balls as though
they were tied by strings to his feet. Just because you
try so hard you want to start a fight
I heard you called me a Mary Jane, kid.
Explain aviation, the sweep of lightning
brightening the cloud masses out over the South
Pacific, kid. A passionless woman who smiles
My heart is a bag worn thin in patches so you can
see in, kid. Are you the kid who will touch my face
and make me draw away when your hand alights on my
coif? You work hard and you’re not good enough
Because you work hard you’re not good enough
to call and say I love you only yell you are gone

Someone is talking to you and her words are like raindrops
on your windshield. Her “egg yolk” congeals as footsteps
in socks approach from across blasted fields, weed withered
and winter sere. Hammers hit drums with soft
brushes. A step closer is to decide to divide and beyond
equal is not equal. Like that roseate backlight which underlit
the clouds always clouds the enlacing, the interlacing
winter boughs. On this lone highway only the kiss of drops
and the spattering of soft melting gobs of roadsnow like touches
human touches women’s touches whose sensations spread
on a meniscus of liquefying ice, slick and impossible to cling
for the substance of the touch is the snow falling on the road
losing its energy as it melts on the car on the skin.
Someone is talking to you and her words are like silence

Moolooboola street-island sawblade leaves
the plate of bacon and the womanly flower
and this does not prepare you for my beloved
corps to visit you in loneliest hour
You with your no spirit, your no soul no aura
but you want to get fucked not view endless porn-
o. My beloved corps will deliver my heart
in ziplock, adoring you and desiring you and your
adroitly slipped bonds, all the attachments to things
mundane and corporeal that you have eschewed
in the misguided notion that escapes
have proved you worthy of my beloved corps.
Ants bite the feet and jellyfish sting the ears
You fear the earth you walk through it unseeing

You’re going feminine— out not in
as if it were some kind of jail. Jail-
break saying years choked you. Feminine out
direction through clod soil hard and tough pale green
harsh and relentless and as stupid as anything that grew
unheeding of the medium through which it pushed
Behind a boat furls a wake and the water shapes
lyre legs squeezed together and a bush
Some feet are fair to me some not, some socks
approach across blasted fields, hairy with stuck
grasses brown and sere. My life spurted
from under foot as if in flight on a time line
at angle to ours, the angle opens seconds to years,
a door opens a doorway widens like a smile

Unworthy project, effort wasted with shame
A fell foot affronts facades washed with fire
Behind a boat furls a wake and the water shapes
the lower half of a woman and my brother has a gun
in the cockpit for shooting obstreperous crabs
who might crawl from so-called pots, traps, buoyed nets.
Some pot is calling kettles bitches yo
“Slim Shady you listen to Christian rap!”
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Between a goat with a tire and a dead shark
the pageant of modern animals.
I wanted once to wear the burlap brown
St. Francis, oh St. Francis please to bless
our sympathetic taxidermies.