Annual

I love the inverted interment of summer planting:
burying the to-be-living
while wearing bright yellow gloves
and singing something by Simon and Garfunkel: 

I'd rather be the trousers than the belt,
I'd rather be the salsa than the beans,
I'd rather be Manhattan than the Bronx—
that was usually when you'd roll your eyes.

I watched you make deliberate, angled passes
with the mower, a dozen grackles
already at your heels, ravenous
for the churned up nightcrawlers, some in halves. 

Cuffs spilling over with cut grass,
you'd scatter throughout the house, and I'd track you
by the loose, drying arrows in the shag. 
You've been shearing green sheep again, I'd say.

Two weeks into the spring,
snails and caterpillars turned everything to frail lace. 
I became a butcher of small things,
sowing death from a sack of poison pellets. 

One night, I turned back
from the garden to the house. 
You were silhouetted against the yellow
of the open door,

and I watched you walk the plank
of light along the ground
and step off into the darkness. 

This took nearly a year to happen.

Originally published in Third Coast

Provenance

One of the workmen will be pulling down
the old paneling, enjoying how easily
it comes away from the wall, the nails sliding
from their holes with a rusty frisson.
About a yard of plaster will lay bare before
he uncovers what he'll think is wallpaper,
the pattern a faded landscape in miniature,
or the silhouettes of lean clouds over a dune,
or schools of brown eels. But then
he will recognize the word "unyielding," then "thighbone":
your copperplate, some seventy years out of fashion,
slanting across the west and north walls from ceiling
to wainscoting—one hundred poems pasted under the wood,
untitled, separated with microscopic Roman numerals.
It will be a genteel kind of shock, like finding a ghost
who does not know he is a ghost, content to amble
in circles around the same garret, murmuring
mild-mannered exclamations in threadbare shirtsleeves.
You’d done this so that when they came
to take your typewriter, it could go
with them silent and blameless to render
its dutiful cha-cha for a neophyte clerk
with a quiet passion for the stenographer's knees.
It would not be able to say how the city became
a nightmare of starlings, the evening air a plague
of tinny fugues. Or how love was like an orange,
a thing to be stripped with one's fingernails,
split by the seams of its bitter pith and made to weep
a sweetness which burns in the cracked corners
of an open mouth. A ceiling leak had cut a bleeding
trail through your ode to ______, something
all at once angel and machine, rocking us into dreams
while the earth splits against history's sullen plow.
You'd named yourself a joiner, a rag-picker,
knitting together a day's scurf into poetry. One can only be
sure of the pieces—the whole is the business of God alone.
All our art is dumb luck anyway, a morbid nursery rhyme
of diminishment: for every one of our masterpieces,
there's one rotting to threads behind a screen
in the asylum, one crushed to mortar in the siege,
one blamelessly lost in a street bazaar,
one binding the wound of the heretic,
one in a house burned to its stone roots before the renovations,
consigning us to only the signature of flame.

Originally published in American Literary Review