Amends

Pinto beans. Their camel
coat. A bowl like
a halved pumpkin;
how tall its sides slant.
How soaking thrusts
water up into millimeters
of concentration.

Five minutes more
to overnight supine—lie as
fetal as sleep forfeiting
its heat. So my eyes won’t
dry out from voracity.

To surfeit myself
I needn’t describe.

Amends

The house smells
of apples after just
an hour or
two’s absence.

There is no more
now. We have been
cohabiting with some
secret fermentation.

Some filth
as transparent as
desire; some attachment
as filthy as the occupation

of rubbing an eraser.
Does erasing sculpt
the eraser’s loaf-
like wedge or scuff our
miscellaneously emoting

“oops”es as it paces
the paper? Our to-do
list is forbidden from adding
captives. What

is coincident and what
is reciprocal? My grip
experimenting with
your doorknob, your
hand jangling mine? What

might bother to
exalt all our panting? Some
intermediate zone behind the naked
walls medicine has infested?

Amends

blue naproxen bluer
than viagra blue

blue I ingest
to disaffect my tennis elbow

how can I not remember
over and over
modeling again that injurious gesture
there’s no “this” without
even half a picture
or the poignancy it intimates

injurious gesture
impressionistic mechanics
my tendons retain
limp and miserly
an old knuckleballer packing one side
of his satchel with receipt
papers glossy as crickets

do you describe pain
as radiating
fire or ice
a numbing bonded
to scalpel or
bib’s smother
exponentials
or sleigh bells

cupping my hands around
the weight of water
is pretty dire
a flushing bluer
than naproxen blue

I must confess
I am cauterized
by carelessness
in the presence of others

in embalmed company
cocked-up with menthol and camphor
I lack for fostering
calibrations of care
some self could score
hash after hash
space
invaders in their inexorable
columns

some self believing somewhere
a slide rule isn’t
the stub of a dodo

Amends

night squirms

ladybug in reverse
black elytra
daubs of blood

night twitches
with none of my ideas

atop this hard and borrowed
mattress an ache like
a vine splints and strangles
the side I’ve been
handcuffed to

and I am absorbed
utterly by the screaming
the toads recycle

Amends

the fig tree has gone out
its flimsy oyster shell split

no more prefiguring
as many arms as paradigms
of flaw and epitome
darkened life five a.m.’s
brownout anthropomorphizes
as colossus

eidolon in a bottled Venus

spring obtains and
the air exchange sweats
through the carpentry

one morning, rising
from the toilet
I stumbled against the door
my wristwatch’s crown
and bezel turned adze

the core accident unhollowed
peeking still out of those
palmate rudiments

Amends

the stove coil
a spinning wheel
the knob snaps

into its detent
this hidden noise
of what’s disallowed

transmutes early into
latethe last minute
into time to spare

to fit into daughterhood I had
to resist crouching and
stretch to fill that sultry

chamber taken to more monstrous
extremes day by day
the rice spits forever boiling

over helpfullya wooden
stirring knocks it down but first
gravity must be centered

a simple experiment in improvement
becomes a promise in the toils
of plundering’s

rhythmI plant
my leg straight
up to my waist

and tear
my wantonness
in two

(Image: Barnett Newman’s Cathedra (1951))