Black Coffin with Milk

Take the measure of wooden speech with a wooden tongue

The sound waves crash in, like a handful of grasshoppers

Take the nails and bang them into the weeping painting

The kids are shouting what they’re for: it’s making noise

Making noise and drinking milk with a magnifying glass

The ancestor’s dead from reading books and breathing

From boxing vegetables and reading books and breathing

The cardboard boxes are in his brain in tiny mirroring bits

From the vein in his forehead to the vein in his toe they run

They run like children to the school milk and the myths

Out of the crush they would say of him, mad as a string

The trees would say different of course when they saw him

Out of grace, they never were, they would mimic Umback

The leaves in his hair were the marks of a bush comedy

A bush comedy so good it could run forever without seats

The little version of the novel, every novel he read at night

That he played out with his bosses, with strangers, his wife

The wife has another ancestor with the same name, related

That the lightning spilled down the hill in hot liquid form

A form that was repeated and parodied in the hill’s plants

Take this string and wrap it round the painting as if alive

As if alive and attempting to survive out there in the bush

Take the clock and time the boy who went to get the milk

As if you can get milk from a large white rabbit that makes

The sound of death, chewing grasshoppers like a machine