Letters Come Like Small Animals

Carol Peters, Atlanta Botanical Garden [Chris Mastin]

Letters Come Like Small Animals

Come, candle & maroon

cilantro, green, come braid & fist.

I have prepared for you

sequences of a cathedral in blue —

no tornado-heralding downshift

to ivory plum, asparagus cream

when I say your name.

Do I draw water

a portrait, curtain, bridge, or conclusion?

Bosh fling into the spore a grew long: fling

on flew the spore, ol’

green heard. Fling on

as a hand did try to chalk the sun

to races — nurtured in the dark —

if we had put our ears to the ground

we might have heard the horses.

There is no sun in another room

but let it come out

rocking in its chair.

This is your second chance to

build a cool kitchen with free cats circumventing

like a seam on a purple yellow sari you watched spinning

as it stood on a bus.

Some of us have taken off our wigs

the immense colossal weight

of our hope. Sex is part of it

the wound

of anticipation under thin cloths

of appetite

cantankerous mutiny eating through the nipples of our breasts.

Or is this what god thinks?

Or am I what god thinks?

Or am I alone?

Stones rock. Stones, rock, rockstone, stonerock

an escarpment on the wander.

Phantoms spring from your mind

and run you around like a fox or a rat

through back alleys

in the first canto of the final canticle.

Her hand composed him and composed the tree.

I mean this is measuring not

pageantry, dear sweet

silly blind Rooster

the old as simply that — but the struggle in

my flip point

doll or duck whose end ties

to you trickley jams

the bud part erasing.

Now I will rest yes in the arms as it were

of my lover he is great with a pitchfork

he loves all our senators —

grieving eagles.

So softly a lunar beam closes

as she charges his porringer

from a piggin of steamed milk.

The desert moves like a museum made of light

along the boundary of the useful

farm, what a thin light, the road swinging

uphill its two directions, the slushy ruts

this distinguished boat

now for oblivion, at sea, a

sweet and horrid joke in dubious taste —

I stole the leaded smoke-blue windows.

Two figures, unbeknownst to each other

soldered at the head, bodies angling

out like a roof

not even metal smithing nor the even-marking tires

the soles of defunct shoes

a trestle terror on the dark train —

over what? held by what?

Terrible, immense abyss —

if there’s someone falling here, half

dark half sun, like embers, into thoughts

and leaves the shapes of bottles

frostbitten, the boat in his hands

is best and when she talks of tying up her hair

his bones of such is coral

raised up out of his grave.

As a missive I proliferate

your pigeonholes of pleasure

and some geese will say

that maxim scans a lot like S&M

does. Improbable skin.

I think it’s the locked doors that have made me drunk.

I could howl out of every lock and paper-clip.

Letters come like small animals, curled in relative

warmth. Their alphabets shift when I turn.

Fierceness itself was

what made the lily flame.

[original lines taken from poems by Tom Clark, Clark Coolidge, T. Zachary Cotler, Connie Deanovich, Emily Dickinson, Stacy Doris, Robert Duncan, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Elena Fanailova, Susan Gevirtz, Noah Eli Gordon, Kate Greenstreet, Mộng Lan, Giacomo Leopardi, Osip Mandelstam, Malinda Markham, Bernadette Mayer, Shane McCrae, Sandra Meek, Joseph Millar, Hilda Morley, Paul Muldoon, Lorine Niedecker, Ethan Paquin, Kathleen Peirce, Elizabeth Robinson, Leslie Scalapino, Brenca Shaughnessy, Lauren Shufran, Heidi Lynn Staples, Wallace Stevens, Georg Trakl, Stacey Waite, Rosmarie Waldrop, Margaret Walker, John Wieners]