Happy the Man

Goodbye words;

my faltering muse's

unevenly burning flame

has sputtered out, and now like Diocletian

I'm taking early retirement.

Homesteading:

goats, organic lettuce,

that's the project; and when I

buck blowdowns or shovel dung from a pickup,

I'll remember how you once

were all I

needed or anyway

wanted of the crack and the grain

of real things; how in your loam they'd swell, split

and banner out into themselves...

Now you can

just be their names again:

bluestone, shiplap, whatever.

And if I write, it'll be with a seed-drill;

a quatrain of greens per bed, no sweat.

The dirt road

dead-ends on wilderness;

sometimes at night you can hear

unearthly gabblings: Bear Mountain's coyotes

closing in on a kill. Pure poetry.

Adam

Seed-hoarder: tipping his paper pouches

in unnibbleable coffers; fencing,

filching our food, homeland; won't chatter

the local woods brogue of chirrup and chuck,

his othering tongue unchristening tree,

unrocking rock.

He's not one of us; he's

definitely not one of us:

unstriped meat-breather pissing ammonia; we feign

blitheness but from each

brush-pile, oak-stump, ash-limb,

we are watching him.

Chainsaw I

As though you held in your hands

the severed head of Orpheus

crying his own sparagmos ;

the mutilated bower

falling, still in flower -

or your own split kingdom's

hybrid of lion and unicorn:

at once dismembering tooth

and clarifying horn.