MebraḈe

M  braḈe

     braḈebraḈe

       raḈe  raḈe

Dampening your window sill
dragging in a large spider
by its thorn-dewy shins,
you yowl heatedly.

The sheltering accomplice weaves a breakfast trap
from one end of your kitchen to the other.

The morning news comes through
a timepiece on your wrist;
a caterpillar has used your blanket
in the night
and is hanging with it in your closet,
changing.
"Time keeps on slipping into the future,"
said the wound-up news.

Your teeth are brushed

and neatly parted.
"Let my spirit carry me,"
prayed the spider when you cut its web down
with a pair of pruning shears.

And then it ate you:
it sucked your blood through column wounds in your back,
siphoning the digested burger of your heart.

The sucking couldn't stop, and the spider scarcely thought.

"Time keeps on slipping into the future,"
said the wounded timepiece on your wrist.

By lunch the caterpillar had welded to a false sun
wearing your best disco vinyls
and a tie
and a Christmas hat with antlers and hanging bells.

Your electric potential might have reminded angels
to wake you in the morning,

so a fresh moth's perfume has woken you from life this morning,
before lunch buffets, before the grand coin-op waffle iron rings,

by taking your bedclothes in the middle of the night,
and the two of you
follow Rapunzel's lover through the front door
and into the forest.

You try to pull meaning from things,
and it falls
so fluffily
apart into fingerprints.
While painfully scaling the cryogeometries of Mt. Foxglove,
you let your arms spool out as fluff,
and in fingerprinted anger
they let you.

As if around were here, she said; her man

took off, dissolved into the film. Hemmed

frowns shimmered contagious. The birds began

to be remembered, upsetting above

the cutting room, which pitched and spoke dust

eyelashes moved. Outside wings brushed

paints off Allegheny, in crypt the lust

coiled round and wound around a jamb ordeal,

clipboards stuttered, and the reel went silent.

The door was locked into the building,

pulsing star ice clicked in a bird eye. At length

an ET moved to issue a command:

What you have seen remains here forever.

The bird's poisoned by a bit of clover.

That's a lot of heading south,
I said.

The birds were on a telephone wire
downtown at a festival
they had joined,
a gladiator's match an echo.

I wondered if the birds had any friends.

The sound parted.
I watched several hundred black
butterflies take off.

In seconds they had settled—
were settling along the wire
like magnetic soot, tracing it through the back streets drawing
on the late autumn sky
falling in the evening gold leaves.

Again, after hopping lines to see
the creatures went up in a vapor;
I ducked when they flew at my loft,
my heart smoked when the pendulum missed.

Eventually they did leave. They lifted themselves up
like a giant stalker,
hung in one dizzy
bulb,
made an acrobatic revolution,
and tiptoed off like a cannon.

I am a cut. Dirty blood is all my failure. I am bleeding scarves on the wind in the water, luscious red scarves taking my failure from me. The word suddenly is beautiful, a state, an entry granted to the queen. La Noblesse, Her Fairness. Why be afraid? Why be proud, ashamed? There is no shame in a dead end, a quote of nature, an icicle. In the heart, an icicle. Flagstones covered with it. Growing.

In Wrangell-St. Elias:
a 380 nm octave burning
sporocarp hills, a lensing
wet lacquer above.
The black hole at the center of the Milky Way
spun its mass microscope
to catch a zoom photo

and this is how it looked.

There was sometime a creature in the wind
who cried and fretted sweet her voice;
she plucked your green felt cap and,
coat and hair, she in her likeness rearranged you;

she ridiculed the leaves
who died of shame for weeks; once those
villagers drew barrels to their ears, they
lost aim rusting in the sun;

to pry, she'd smooth her vegetation,
folding it in sound,
challenging and boasting
while among the variations in her song
an insect council played; in a morning fog
she dozed from lullabies;

cry how fields were shorn, how
on ground her death frosts thick;
where you kept your humor
she has been a pile of stones

for you, your rest: in
a sky left wider than before
the dust is growing deserts and
its quarreling is funereal.