Cold hole in my right pant
through which
grass’s eyelash brushes my calf,
flirty infinite
*
I’m shimmery, holographic,
mental projection on a stone church floor labyrinth
by a bored peasant
in a lost epoch
John Clodpebble
his piddly knack
not for conjuring face-shapes in clouds (commonplace)
but for cloud-shapes in faces (wow)
I’m Son of Clod,
glimpse in a passing face
burn scars on the sand where the reenactment was filmed
*
What’s this?
I’ve without even grinding by crawling across continents
my body down found
the grail Américain:
dry cob in dust, rusty where chewed,
roughish, weighty, ok lob it into
stalks stalks
ritual?
yes, unrepeatable
its arc etches sky with the shell pattern rumored lost
*
Off-trail uphill
snagged and snagged by thorns until
a deer thoroughfare opens, then:
a burr on the haunch
of a cloud, I float around …
nary a highwayman!
tra-la
I can even pretend
cyber-warriors aren’t hunting me in the wireless air
*
Remember Grasmere Gulch?
O subdivided Youth!
I caught Chinook smolts in the big river,
sneaked the plastic bag plumped with water
past the treatment hut,
poured them out in the creeklet pool
where it burped from its pipe, waited
for the flickers of life,
but
got my license and had better things to do
three years later
than check if any returned from the sea
*
I long to let walking be
about the great not-me, but
here’s a refrigerator wrecked in a ravine
and I remember, 8, anxiously awake
at midnight, I was
discovered at the kitchen table
drawing plans for the power plant run
by house-sized magnets of opposite polarity
and urged to go back to sleep
*
My legs by their gear-grinding
whir me open dada contraption
in love with its uselessness
(eggbeater-cloudbeater)
*
I, Clodpebble the Nth, admit
I was trying to have an experience
So, the bridge in the city of jazz leads to
a gate-less hinge pitted by rust on a post in a field, huh,
I guess there’s nothing left to open
and, as teens with stones
must naturally smash
old plate-glass windows in an abandoned factory,
I smashed the creek ice into tangent panels
with the stick I carry,
was awed the next day
at the layered way the fragments had re-frozen
*
What is not information?
(riddle)
my religion’s only sacred text
if I had a religion
I’d text it to you
if I had your number
*
Alright I have a religion,
THE DOCTRINE AND, and
it changes hourly:
now it is a road curving uphill out of sight,
now a bloody feather
I’m not, however,
going to try to fly off into the “circumambient gases”
or tickle infinity back, I’ll just hunker
in mud and mend this schism
between the bird imagery faction
(who prefer the riddle of the whole sky contained
in an acorn-sized speckled egg)
and the fish imagery sect
(who say a hundred fingerlings breaking the surface at once
escaping some larger thing
ought to be stamped in metal somehow
on wind-chimes and hung in our yards)
Sure, I say, and
a farm dog tugging with bared teeth at a deer corpse in a ditch
could be nice in gold stitching
and a child breathing between gulps of water from a cup
could be Hymn no. 2 in the Hymn Book
What about Hymn no. 1?
It would be confusing to have one
in this religion: the congregants are clouds and me
strip by strip peeling
a stick to arrive again at fingertip idiot joy
Don’t peace me when I’m in this state!
Your hair will get bark flakes all in it
and your hair is so nuanced and sculpted right now
you look like the antipope
my religion would hire if we could afford it
Will you be our antipope, pro bono, bro?
All you’ve got to do is walk around looking
like whatever happens next is not
the very thing