copies of herself
on a conveyor belt,
a kind of statistical paradise.
The way those selves lie parallel
under invisible buffet covers
is the way two people fall asleep
in separate cocoons
to dream or not dream,
sneeze-guarded.
DOLL CHORUS
The job of the chorus is to explicate the major themes
and to be constant as weather.
Girls stage-whisper pathetic fallacies,
the thunder of their ankles cracking
like hail on wrought-iron railings.
Is the red of their mouths on the horizon –
like the pigment from fifty crushed penny beetles –
a warning?
Whether or not it rains,
the themes recur,
the girls defer,
my chest grows new fur,
a gopher steps out,
leaving its shadow on the hook.
It’s spring again.
STILL LIFE WITH LOVE DOLL AND POTATO
Two whatsits cheek by jowl in a kitchen.
She slumped over the bunion of the tuber.
As if the snow globe of the world shook
and they collided, an unlikely set –
Barbie and her jowly pug, heroine and sidekick,
kid at Christmas cradling her rare
albino coal, Madonna and infant
of an irradiated cosmos, shiny as ash.
But it was getting on supper hour.
I cooked romantically – you can guess who lost out.
I cleaned a dozen gleaming sockets
with my peeler’s plover end,
an eye, an eye, an eye.
In time a broom swept through, filtering
the little glints of sight from the tile.
Who knows what anyone sees in anything?
Three
In which I burn at both ends of the afterlife
MUSE:
Is the firefly before the amber,
a vowel to bend a precious metal mouth.
Leaves the back seat ablaze with BBQ-chip fingerprints.
Pilots past in a bath towel before putting on clothes.
Is a phase of the moon of a Lazy Susan’s twirl,
first fleck of dust before a landslide.
Tickles in the throat of the pawn shop’s hourglass.
Dangles several centuries from the asterisk of her smile.
Slips into something so comfortable it’s permanent.
Is survived by upskirt voyeurs of the cathedral ceiling,
open-mouthed gnomes at the screes of wind instruments.
Sleeps under a duvet of soot thick as the icing
from candlelight vigils.
THE MEN OF ACTION, FALLING
Brian is tiny, the size of a dime but slimmer
as he corkscrews down the funnel
to the Hospital Auxiliary collection bin.
As fast as a drop peels down porcelain
he slips downtown, underground, rock bottom.
He is good at it, athletic even.
Takes it like a flicked ant –
all its bones on the outside, glowing tarmac,
still clutching a diamond
of sugar for the queen.
Turns out Brian has more practice
than your average heartbreaker –
he’s been falling since age nine or eleven.
Hurtling brakeless on his skateboard
in the wrong kind of jeans,
powered by the wrong brand of batteries,
Brian bounced off the lip of his driveway
into the abyss. Would you fetch some gladiolas
on your way back, dear?
his mother called after him repeatedly.
Brian was not ugly, but the other children
kept this information to themselves.
His one-time fear of escalators,
his brushes with halitosis, the reek
of his father’s mistress’s shaving foam
in the tropics of the bathroom.
The time he totalled a cat
on the grin of his sister’s Volvo,
and the sky turned fur somersaults.
When he was so poor and so clueless about cooking
he got scurvy. And a girl bowled his five-pin psyche
like a hedgehog down a gutter. The twenty times.
The forty. Poor Brian.
Tonight the sky from my window
is a thousand-storey game of pinball.
I make him out amid lit pegs in his shabby velvet plummet:
a freckle. The moss he gathers is a lint pill of stardust.
He lands, if anywhere, below the horizon’s overbite,
gets up to his old tricks, if at all, in miniature.
Not even seismographs detect
what his so-small-it’s-unopposable thumb
is doing to that blouse, what slim reverberations
tease out under.
A postscript:
I wanted to dream about something bigger than you tonight,
Brian, I really did. Lately I’ve been galloping on horseback
and seem to have the power.
But my war pony was itching for a charge
through the miniature
on a conveyor belt,
a kind of statistical paradise.
The way those selves lie parallel
under invisible buffet covers
is the way two people fall asleep
in separate cocoons
to dream or not dream,
sneeze-guarded.
DOLL CHORUS
The job of the chorus is to explicate the major themes
and to be constant as weather.
Girls stage-whisper pathetic fallacies,
the thunder of their ankles cracking
like hail on wrought-iron railings.
Is the red of their mouths on the horizon –
like the pigment from fifty crushed penny beetles –
a warning?
Whether or not it rains,
the themes recur,
the girls defer,
my chest grows new fur,
a gopher steps out,
leaving its shadow on the hook.
It’s spring again.
STILL LIFE WITH LOVE DOLL AND POTATO
Two whatsits cheek by jowl in a kitchen.
She slumped over the bunion of the tuber.
As if the snow globe of the world shook
and they collided, an unlikely set –
Barbie and her jowly pug, heroine and sidekick,
kid at Christmas cradling her rare
albino coal, Madonna and infant
of an irradiated cosmos, shiny as ash.
But it was getting on supper hour.
I cooked romantically – you can guess who lost out.
I cleaned a dozen gleaming sockets
with my peeler’s plover end,
an eye, an eye, an eye.
In time a broom swept through, filtering
the little glints of sight from the tile.
Who knows what anyone sees in anything?
Three
In which I burn at both ends of the afterlife
MUSE:
Is the firefly before the amber,
a vowel to bend a precious metal mouth.
Leaves the back seat ablaze with BBQ-chip fingerprints.
Pilots past in a bath towel before putting on clothes.
Is a phase of the moon of a Lazy Susan’s twirl,
first fleck of dust before a landslide.
Tickles in the throat of the pawn shop’s hourglass.
Dangles several centuries from the asterisk of her smile.
Slips into something so comfortable it’s permanent.
Is survived by upskirt voyeurs of the cathedral ceiling,
open-mouthed gnomes at the screes of wind instruments.
Sleeps under a duvet of soot thick as the icing
from candlelight vigils.
THE MEN OF ACTION, FALLING
Brian is tiny, the size of a dime but slimmer
as he corkscrews down the funnel
to the Hospital Auxiliary collection bin.
As fast as a drop peels down porcelain
he slips downtown, underground, rock bottom.
He is good at it, athletic even.
Takes it like a flicked ant –
all its bones on the outside, glowing tarmac,
still clutching a diamond
of sugar for the queen.
Turns out Brian has more practice
than your average heartbreaker –
he’s been falling since age nine or eleven.
Hurtling brakeless on his skateboard
in the wrong kind of jeans,
powered by the wrong brand of batteries,
Brian bounced off the lip of his driveway
into the abyss. Would you fetch some gladiolas
on your way back, dear?
his mother called after him repeatedly.
Brian was not ugly, but the other children
kept this information to themselves.
His one-time fear of escalators,
his brushes with halitosis, the reek
of his father’s mistress’s shaving foam
in the tropics of the bathroom.
The time he totalled a cat
on the grin of his sister’s Volvo,
and the sky turned fur somersaults.
When he was so poor and so clueless about cooking
he got scurvy. And a girl bowled his five-pin psyche
like a hedgehog down a gutter. The twenty times.
The forty. Poor Brian.
Tonight the sky from my window
is a thousand-storey game of pinball.
I make him out amid lit pegs in his shabby velvet plummet:
a freckle. The moss he gathers is a lint pill of stardust.
He lands, if anywhere, below the horizon’s overbite,
gets up to his old tricks, if at all, in miniature.
Not even seismographs detect
what his so-small-it’s-unopposable thumb
is doing to that blouse, what slim reverberations
tease out under.
A postscript:
I wanted to dream about something bigger than you tonight,
Brian, I really did. Lately I’ve been galloping on horseback
and seem to have the power.
But my war pony was itching for a charge
through the miniature
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