I sleep late and swell on the vine.

Bees are the undertakers of my cosmology.

I flexed my eyes against the ink of midnight.

The Mississippi gin cradles my recluse

Like hounds it corners the sick and the weak.

This cotton field begins the hunt.

A lit cigarette drops from the moon’s single eye.

Before dawn its headlights waver the grain

Dying scattered over the heads of drums.

We are the Christs of our sisters’ long dream.

Butterflies dropped eggs along the their glowing curls.

The word stakes its claim on morning

And tangles shadows with an axe head.

The tide forms a prison in the delta.

I have burned my wilderness to embers.

Your dark honey drips between the pillows.

Blue shadows shuffle like crawdads along the ridgepole.

Like a paper rattlesnake bound to a chair

Clouds became a trembling sonogram

And corroded the village like an endless ladder.

That blackened winter, my I became a restless vision

At school, I shrouded my chariots in a contemptuous cloak

My mumbled phrases were the orphans of an abandoned tongue

They would have thrived as the stewards of a punishing armada

At school, I shrouded my chariots in a contemptuous cloak

Perhaps my I is a restless scapegoat, buffeted by zephyrs

They would have thrived as the stewards of a punishing armada

I think you are an abbreviated mirror in the body of a baron

Perhaps my I is a restless scapegoat, buffeted by zephyrs

And my daughter is a poet of the commercial still-life

I think you are an abbreviated mirror in the body of a baron

The way a stream runs downhill until it joins the moon

And my daughter is a poet of the commercial still-life

So I learned to bicker with an impregnable wall of canvas

The way a stream runs downhill until it joins the moon

That blackened winter, my I became a restless vision

So I learned to bicker with an impregnable wall of canvas

My mumbled phrases were the orphans of an abandoned tongue