As to nothing with her trailing veils, the nothing of the memoir,
The smoke unfinished as the meal charred in a charnel hole,
A buried bar b cue of pink ham and gristle, falling off the bone
As the vulture, eagle, rat represent us and our destruction,
Our failing heat and icy look, an insinuation that blankets
The spurt of lover’s blood with a tired concession.

We talked it all through and came to nothing.
Don’t be discouraged or optimistic.
Take no warnings or bald statements.
Some other fat bird laid down in the coals to sputter, spit and spatter the fat
Around its tin pressed pan and face scrunched as feather beards in a
Feast of mutual recognition on our chins, on our minds, on the beach.

Grave baby, can you make it a little longer
With rows of pineapple and plantation money,
Alternative commentary measured as long as your arm,
Your damp sleeve, the crook of your elbow
Stealing sleep and artichokes from land holders who put
Smoke from oil on tender buds of fruit.

Save us cold, make us hot, rub our sticks.
Bend in to the trough of the mind, the feed station, the blanket ration.
Make a place marked on pavement like the chalk outline,
Officer, of a body. Tell tall and cringe low for
Involvement violates the sanctity of isolation.
It gives our hands and rubbed feet,
Dusty red stigmata marked on earth like a target.

Marked on dirt as temporary and each passenger of the wake
Throws a hand full of land in the six foot hole
Until it is a shallow mound on the land
Like the cards of a player piano punched for a piquant rhythm,
Square in the face, bussed to the jaws of the river
Where it used to know the sea and now
Knows off limit reactors and barbed wire.

Slight, thin and rusty,
We can hold it in our hands,
Work it with our gloves and
Roll it back up, with some effort,
Into a ragged, barbed bail
To be carted somewhere else.
Our little green plots,
Terraces of captured water,
Alveoli of the planet
Besmirching itself in the lush nutrient of the dead.

Stick your spade in the black mud.
Take no advice.
Feel the suck and slurp of water mixed viscous with land,
Buried millennia, sand stones, migmatites, elements of the mantle
Now glowing smoking, calling at her surface, earth surface,
Sulfur, pitch and hell, black bituminous scorched glory,
Cramped fury below ground, below lung, at the meeting of mesentery and
Suspended bowel, the crouch of infirmed sorcerers and humble constipation,
Of the constitution written for free white men.

None free, Income Innisfree, none free.
Table rest on four legs, the Yuga of the plain and suffering of corn rows,
Millet, wheat and rice, green in its tinkling stream,
Forgiving the muddy land and slide
Like an avalanche of snow
Covering the inner river of freeze and thaw,
Protective, heavy and mute.

The problem is not one of going too far, too abstract, too irrelevant,
But of not seeking far enough into the hearts of mysterious connection.