Why it's fine sometimes

Why It’s Fine Sometimes

1.

We can, despite

Just deal with what’s here

Among the duck decoys  and prints

discuss nothing more than painted birds.

Then there was Iron sulfide and copper green, just

To color the dust of our respective desktops

In alluding to Cennini  (or Thompson!) we channeled a precedent

The gist of gris and bone and clay of older rivers

As if our lives needed any more color

What our careful , un-cautious bodies did.

2.

Of December, not bitterly but seasonal,

the cold breath against orange artificial light

Where bodies crowd to form steam, a kind of haze

Eyes and lips now hot with wine, where you

Where we, hustled to heaven.

Past Campo, where the gallows have become a decoration

To consumption, we battle to the portal

The city hungry for us.

3.

Where we redefine consumption .

A curse of tempo, the grinding of gears near

Closely to a dream we had, nearly conscious.

The field is strewn with them, in every shadow

The corner table in a midnight trattoria

for amatriciana: the word itself a matrix of lovers

among such graceful slurping, some brave abandon.

We recline while the world goes vertical, between the icy stairs

And the undergrowth, against stone where

bodies have pushed before, anciently in nature or in the den

before a fire on the solstice.

Porcelain playing cards, immaculate zeroes.

Cochineal, carmine, most commonly used in lipstick

Iron, sulfur, an acid, tannins, oxygen

Our pigments pressed

Ferment.

4.

No one knows why my father is still alive.

We train ourselves to detach. After work, in stages

Dealing with each orifice in its own way

Filling or releasing

Finally to eliminate the noise.  A state of shock

Otherwise, lives

We think it grows but it decays

And there are knobs for decay, gain, reverb, echo, delay

Where sound can contract and repeat

Or lay itself out horizontal, in real time

The small functions of memory and forecast conveniently

Calculate out the present.

Much unlike flying a kite or going polar at Nags Head.

And I keep moving through the words

of First Flight: They call her Kitty Hawk

A place and her wind, together forever.

They extinguish me.

5.

We can deal with what

Unjustly or justly is here.

We swear dear prayers about

Practical malfunctions

But you know what they say about hindsight

Yesterday the Pope released two white doves

Immediately and violently devoured by a few gulls and crow

And tonight I gutted a rooster

Pulled out the entire life of a thing and made it less

useless

Heart and liver with onions and vin santo, anchovies, butter on warm bread

a large stomach, small lungs, above the neck and below the knees

gone. 

I once killed a duck, and several puppies.

My bathroom is full of bones of birds.

The wishbone protects the chest

Especially on Valentine’s day.