Sundress, Fortress

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ORONOLIAN REEL

Down the orchard ladder our Emissaries came.
They had been letting the sea do their laundry.
They had been sentenced to bear false witness.
Part the blinds and the sun guillotines.
Pull them, and light chokes back its lure.
Bigger than any country music legend.
Brighter than a birdroom for stars.

Down the orchard ladder our Emissaries came.
With a taxidermist’s jar of glass eyes.
With the underwater wind of riptides.
Part my low-lying lap-pleated hands.
Pull my hair back.
Bigger than a blind man’s once-over.
Badder than sailors home from their maroon.

Down the orchard ladder our Emissaries came.
Afterwards my arm hairs laid like flood grass.
Aftermath is the sum of nothing but the facts.
Part my seeing into staying and leaving.
Pull the chute on my left-leaning heart.
Record the euthanists rehearsing.
Mic the trapeze snap.

Down the orchard ladder our Emissaries came.
In the household of their cupped hands
was the river we ransomed.
In the pits along their mantrap lines
was the butler we let go.
Part the flaming bulrushes, the sunken river sticks.
Pull yourself together, ’cause our Emissaries have come

down the aluminium rungs we sawed
half-through, and they’re standing,
wearing “I’m with Stupid” T-shirts,
beside you.

PÈRE JOSEPH AND THE BUSH CORD

His hiatuses bloom on the kitchen’s sill.
His shirt snaps like tiny animals falling
through branches. In stride with the clock’s
hypnotics, his throat chops a glass of water
down.

He tugs a stoneboat, with his palomino team
to the birch lot’s edge where silence
shipwrecks on silence.

Where deadfall tangos with live trees.
Like botflies on cowbacks, bird shadows
fleck the rye. Tomorrow he’ll pen and shear
the last-but-not-leasts. And all winter sing
I’ll not go missing on that river.

HEIMLICH

Comes up behind you at a party, masks your eyes
with his mammogram hands, asks, “Guess who?”
A bear hugger from way back. Trains by wrapping
around bridge pilings, vending machines, a Douglas fir.
Avoided at most parties, too clingy, too close a talker.
Hovers near food trays glaring at your chest, hands
rasping between songs. You poke fun at his tight
lederhosen, his tin flute, but you’ve bitten off
more than you can chew. Through the crowd
he rushes to you, binds two fists into one under your
sternum. On his second squeeze the ghosts
of mine canaries flood your mouth and stream
to that part of the horizon he’s left ajar.

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