POETRY

enumclaw ant camp

‘and the ants flowed from ground to sky’ – Sharon Olds – Pine Tree Ode

Funny how easy it feels to puncture the arid earth and
how necessary it seemed then to gently dent it as, you see, the
spokes don’t mean any harm to the earth or to the ants
piled high on either side in a monastic collaboration. They flowed,
tidal-like, and every time I let my mallet down I pierced pricked tickled in as far from
the sun as only being in can be, and we rubbed good, yes, I rubbed the ground
in the steady pleasure only known by rubbing holes, yes, your grace, I made love to
it in a bed of swelling ants crying ‘holy!’ to the sky.

peau de soie
(in two voices)

over the stiff full ashtray and through
the scuffed knowledge of new necessity,
a revolutionary plume
of tarry
huffing breeds

a proposition.

It is not an arrest not
theft, it is not a heist
not crime, it is right

and in a collect settled
decision, the hand was won
as a spectral ream received
a cerebral caress so tender
that it lost all form and exhausted into being
a pourable material feline and
beaming,
obedient
gleaming.

The inside is a necessity
a slight resist, it’s
a soft aside
providing slippery distraction
from any ending:
unencumbered
rot:

it sets up a smooth sleep
that ice can only gesture, fire may
instantly wither, as
there is no in between
with satin.

In fact the only concern here was grip:
how to hold folded water?
Would the stream tear without steady care,
slip past young hands
less than weathered to register
the delicate porosity
so microscopic in its ambition?
Hands must scuff to be cat’s tongues
clay combing soft sheets with
a peerless jagged soft.

The ashtray sparks up another in tandem
silk skin on a smoke, still clutching and
creasing the air with plaids of heat
in a rope toward the roof.

Can we reminisce in future tense? Fleshy legs
overhead and shrouded in bedbug black
unseen unseen, tumbling over fences
in windows and catching glimpses in glass
of a mystery face, flush as a lobster
taped up in a pot, wondering
where the mercy is but not having
the energy to ask for it, then finally
clutching at the accolade
too slippy too soft to ever clutch onto
left pawing in alarm bells light and left
again and out without,
except

for now there is nothing,
which is why we’re doing this
‘Ette, and
as the smoke still spills skyward

the rest may be decided by
a small sackful of satin.

Pissing on a belt loop

fucking the battery dry, we walked home
bag of camera, snow threading the road
like it’s mended, patched up, fuck, it’ll do.

Earlier in hi-vis a fella cranked the concrete
in the centre of the road, twisting this clock fixing
round&round&round&round and the rain ragged
his waterproofs, riddled his expression into a wet
mess. He tends the water ways, siphens
our satiate, stands a wrecked orange marker
toward a hole underneath the bridge, behind
more glassed walls more glassed floors where
only staff know to go, and in how we rolled around now
I can’t straighten my neck. We set to steaming
a privacy in that little carpark, the river worming
away anyway, fella back closing up the O
in the road, work done for the day, & left wet
as the seat beneath
our fingers.