Her Hair Is Rhubarb
Her hair is rhubarb and so astringent that in my haste for a mouthful
we click our teeth together white as chalk and harder than Tali bone
She kneels on the cups of her knees and swallows the spit from the ball of
my tongue red as chokecherries and afterthoughts and her hair cut blunt
With her mother’s scissors the ones she uses for gutting chickens and hems and stitching nametags to collars and elastic waistbands that chaff hips raw
And she levers the skin from my eye with the skip of her tongue revealing grass-cut green and worm-wood brown and in my haste I swallow an oxen of
Bone where scissors shred the caulk of a jaw into rhubarb and the blackest black jujubes blacker than fish roe and harder than a juke knuckle and teeth
Cut crooked in the dorm of a mouth where her father’s black rage channels hatred and blackness black as worry and harder than Tali bone and colic
And I kiss her hair like rhubarb blunt cut with a mother’s haste to gut hems with scissors and chaff raw hips and chicken’s tongues hard as juke and spite
A grievous Injustice
A silage rat suckered underneath the porch
I caught the rope of it’s tail with the end of a stick
I used for ferreting out the mice and hedgehogs
That dug graves in the dirt behind the garden shed
(and caused my father such grievous injustice)
I spate its neck in like a heel of dry bread
And with the truck of my hands
Dug a grave for it in the dirt beside my father’s car
The car he used for joyriding and rousting the neighbors
(from the worry of their beds)
Chalk
I lie with the dogs
Up under the stoop
Of the house
In one cursed swoop (of)
The old crone’s hand
Skin and spine separate
Revealing bone and joint
Whiter than maggots
(and) chalk
Her Belt Buckle
Her belt
Buckle cut a groove
In the wainscoting of her hips
Where bone and denim
Cheat a hand out of raw
Dulcet skin
Her Dulse Lips
Her lips bled dulse
Like chokecherries
Griped in the palm
Of your hand
Her eyes bled cubeb
Like grapes
Stomped by the ungula
Of devils
Her hair bled yellow saffron
Like wheat chaff
Minced in the cogs
Of a thrasher
Her feet bled mucid wine
Like the Jehovah’s
Nailed to the cross
Of her memories
(not mine)
Her Teeth
She had no teeth to speak of
A no man’s land of fence stumps
And gate stiles
Earthen up after an august storm
Or a hard whack
To the mouth
Lead Pellets
Lead pellets
Cutting swaths of bone
Scud metal
Stitching shrapnel
To the stump of an arm
My Great Uncle
My great uncle stove the cow’s head in with the hammer he used
For knocking nails and shims into tracks of dry wood and posts
Its legs buckled under as the hammer hit bone gristle and skull
A popping sound issuing as the hammer swung quick then away
Its eyes went red then white then its shoulders slackened and fell
Then and one last snort of rye whiskey and Presbyter’s admixture
I closed my eyes as it fell tongue tacked to the chisel of its teeth and my Great uncle spitting whiskey and quid into the grain of the barn wood floor
Measured Steps
Scats and bone gathered
Where foot and clod
(meet the roof of hell)
Cloven and measured
On the ribcage of night
Measured in bone and scat
I feel the brine skinning
The Huns of my feet
Steps measured in clods
Spurs and rills of skin
Scuffing the roof of hell
(like devil’s feet)
Cloven and brined
Gathered in the clods
Of false prophets
Of A Face
My body has degenerated
To the point
Where self-recognition
Once a mirror image
Of a face
Is now a crude sketch
Another face within a face
A mouth within a mouth
Eyes that avoid eyes
That avoid the sketch
Of a face
Within a face
The crudeness of a face
Once a mirror image of youth
Of eyes and chin and nose
Now someone else’s
Some crude recognition
Of a face
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
About Me
- Stephen Rowntree
- "Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth". Bruno Schulz
Blog Archive
Links
- Windows Tuneup
- Apmonia: A Site for Samuel Beckett
- Bywords.ca
- Dublin Time and Day
- fORT/dAfORT/dA
- Google News
- John W. MacDonald's Weblog
- New York Freudian Society
- Sigmund Freud-Museum Wien-Vienna
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Taking the Brim _ Took the Broom
- The Blog of Amanda Earl
- The Brazen Head: A James Joyce Public House
No comments:
Post a Comment