Guard? Guard!

Tournaments lasted days and changed you,

but today the living and dead are speaking

through microphone of “I Voted” button,

erogenous zone, a place in the mind’s wrestle,

pause that votes and bets. Other voters return

to homes, run dishwasher, read to kids,

get high and craft. Still others walk the golf course

turning gold with sprinkler. Returns are noted.

No one hangs who had not already planned to hang.

At some point I’ve thrown almost everything,

and broken within, activated like a glow stick.

It is a sustained throwing; an act with its stink

of trash — power out — each evening, the stairs

and the light switch, and a pause at the open door.

Unenunciated stair-structures are closing off

the switch from voice to silence. This morning,

a snail bore its huge garden shell, the color of owl,

into the afternoon. How to choose what to bring!

I set the excess down by the door, for nobody

who is there, or seems that way. Near the fire.

Where the weather vane points is where I’ll carry

my father, slung fleece and steady footfall

into the valley of the painting above the couch,

brushstrokes crazed and smoked, enveloping the riders,

us, trot-dazed in a conjectured landscape

paralyzed by the wind’s chisel. The clouds are a sheet

the volcano staples above parking lots to hills

where owners shit and talk on the last phones.

As long as the sheet holds I will be darling.

Or it is the mildewed sail battened down

where I hide from fathers. Light rain makes

rooftops new. Boughs fracture like lines

an iced-over pond zags ahead of a boot

and in there we get glimpses of inquiry,

otherness to learn more about. Silence

becomes the subject the speaker set out to be,

landscape’s counterpart, and reflection

my resemblance. A hand goes up to stop

the process, and, when the process doesn’t stop,

suppresses until the next moment approaches,

and passes, the bid dizzy with regeneration.

Let’s fold this balloon into animals, vehicles, a weapon,

the air inside song, or last breath, or first. I’m a dog

when I ape my words. Who would dent or differ?

The teeth of the pig are, it whispers, red and brown

and recede now that they have been mentioned.

When I look close: not us. What is inexpressed?

This departure hurries by and is like the lion

who simultaneously guards the books

and elsewhere tests the river with a paw,

stone in the first and lean flesh in the other

world where the sun is blessing its glide back

into thornbushes and I am stone, guarding stone.

There is no predator I would like to be torn in half by,

from the logging road a cut like a jeweler’s work

down to the shore where the sea stars disappeared

leaving nukes and love metered and syllabary

and also the rocks they used to cling to exposed

at low tide, green clocks. At dawn a fishing boat’s

uncertain past the rock offshore, chord on chord.

Warped sexual knuckle in flushed purple

and hundreds of shades of orange, herpetic and stone

to touch, cut, they grow back, vitrified, easy to draw.

Round was the dish of mints in the conference room

where we signed over my mother’s liver,

some mints were soft and pastel, some hard

with white covering. Mint grows back in the creek.

The liver grows back too, largest organ in the body.

No, not skin, mother, skin is on the body — 

we addressed this with the host at trivia night

no, not the one I go to each Sunday with friends,

the constant one I sleep inside of every blink.

Time’s the thing that’s not the mind

or the baby, which wants a nipple.

Time’s a baby in a sling, all the babies

in the park on blankets, beginning,

a minor electricity, water and dust

a kind of suet in a hanging cage

and is larger than whatever the universe

turns out to be (a strawberry pip)

all tough winter, which has been shown

to prosper. Seen from the past the line

is the present when the astronauts came back,

bid us bury our gravity and grow the lines

that are the story of loneliness, waste,

either enough or not enough. I walk past

the potted plants in the side alley,

marigold, sunfollower, a good plate,

give a little water, adjust the moments.

Constellation of last images before sleep:

a walk around the drained reservoir, arrival

at the island; having a theater all to yourself

and they show the movie anyway. Formless

or forming interior scrumble: the fluttering

of her eyelid is like what floats up the chimney.

Something inside is being stepped-down

to the noises from when I was here last. This time

of year you can see to the bottom of the lake.