Poetry

You bought yourself a low-cost house
  for only forty thou’.
Then lost it in a city fire;
  they burn so often now.

It’s normal to do it alone, the feint-and-jab
           of forgetting. I believe in only what I can recite 

from memory, like the ninety-nine names
           for thirst: soft-hell, root-torn-from-soil, rain-

Yes, I’m that Martial known all across the world 
for my elegiac couplets, hendecasyllables,

You can oversell
the sea, say, or
the way we miss

Fox spots Crow in the top of a tree.
“That carrion she pecks must come to me.”
He ponders how to ply his wit
And award himself the whole of it.

He was the last cowboy in Massachusetts,
stabling the palomino in his mother’s garage,

            It was amusing to see
     The quick pet Sparrow and the Cat
     Engage in harmless duels that
  Exercised their friendly rivalry.

Consider the bowerbird and his obsession
of blue, and then the island light, the acacia,
the grounded beasts. Here, the iron smell of blood,
the sweet marrow, fields of grass and bone.

All day I’ve followed roads. Have I come that far?
Terre Haute, Greencastle. Kokomo’s not close, but not far.

The first time you swallow—
the light, lurid and cold—