Flood Song (extract)

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I bite my eyes shut between these songs.   

They are the sounds of blackened insect husks
 		folded over elk teeth in a tin can,
 
they are gull wings fattening on cold air
flapping in a paper sack on the chlorine-stained floor.

They curl in corners, spiked and black-thatched,
stomp across the living room ceiling, 
pull our hair one strand at a time from electric sockets 
and paint our stems with sand in the kitchen sink. 

They speak a double helix,
zigzag a tree trunk,
bark the tips of its leaves with cracked amber—

they plant whispers where shouts incinerate into hisses.










Stepping through the drum’s vibration,
I hear gasoline 
	trickle alongside the fenced-in panorama 
of the reed we climb in from 
and slide my hands into shoes of ocean water.

I step onto the gravel path of swans paved across lake scent,
wrap this blank page around the exclamation point slammed between us.
 
The storm lying outside its fetal shell
folds back its antelope ears 
and hears its heart pounding through powdery earth 
underneath dancers flecking dust from their ankles to thunder into rain.










I am unable to pry my fingers from the axe
	unable to utter a word 
		without grandfather’s accent rippling 
around the stone flung into his thinning mattress.

Years before, he would have named this season 
			by flattening a field where grasshoppers jumped into black smoke.










A crow snaps beak over and over again:
the past is a blurry splotch of red crosshatched with neon light;
	on the drive south, 
			windows pushed down,
		you scoop pellets of canned air 
	and ocean across sand dunes, 
across the waning lick of moonlight on the dashboard 
to crease the horizon 
	between petals of carved snow.










Blue birds chirp icy rocks from their stomachs
and crash 
	with wings caked heavy 
with the dark mud of a gunmetal sky,
to the earth’s bandages 
	shivering with cold spells and convulsions 
		in the market 
			underneath an avalanche of apples. 










A red-tail hawk scrapes the sandstone wall with its beak. 

A shower of sparks skate across the morning sky. 

You think this bottle will open a canyon wall 
and light a trail 
trampled by gloved hands
as you inhale earth, wind, water, 
through the gasoline nozzle 
	at trail’s end, 
		a flint spear driven into the key switch. 

You think you can return to that place 
where your mother held her sleeves above the rising tides 
saying “We are here again
		on the road covered with television snow; 
			we are here again
				the song has thudded.”