in the womb
singer with the stabbed hip's
half notes, quarter notes
tenor mode polytones
tongue glisk
shadow dance
the little brother's
prayer for his sister, new nephew
spine kittle
in dark as well, a womb
grandfathers so old
they saw life
crawl from the sea
hiss to me
(water falls to flinted stone)
"shut your eyes."
arm didders
spirits summoned, some
forgotten, some forsaken,
others offended or maligned,
all remember, in a place
absent honed edges
womb of earth and past
ghost dance
Morrigan's Wash
we're more likely to enter
a strange new world, where
Republicans in office behave
like 1970s Democrats on meth.
James K. Galbraith
i
Stars and Bars, blood-red
their intent, flutter over
a meth-lab scattered
in a bend of the Cullowee. Skies
bust loose. Two nanny-goats, trapped
bleak, seek shelter under crumbled
tin of a lean-to.
ii
Empires, much
older than this, withdraw
moorings, props of our debt
our delusions. Our
treasured Bonds, unsound
seek shelter too. Beyond
our means, elbow deep
in pig-slop -
not the ol' down-on-the-farm
sty-shit. Nah
this is factory-line
slime -- maddened hormones,
purged, loosed microbes
genes pieced, fallowed and plowed.
Rogue nation's sludge of
gluttony. Once it was Europe
on the edge, but Christ -
even Euros climb past
our calcified myths! --
Foundation piers collapse in time.
Prices, crammed in aisles
-- fronted by brick-a-brac
bubble-wrapped end-caps
ascend.
I just read it called
"monetary velocity."
The short course:
swollen wallets to trim
on six-dollar-a-gallon-diets.
The machine will groan slow.
Even houses wont be built
and factories in China to drift back
this side the pond, lured by
ravished communities who
gather burnt offerings --
leveled ridges and ravines -- then
prostrate, blind, offer up the sacrifice
to Wal-Mart and Dell, drag
concave blades to belch
gouge away patient rhythms
of ancient rocks, Yona's
potent medicine, the meadow tag
of wolf and raven, the pucker
of chokecherries under a July sun,
foxfire's magic.
iii
I still believe our spirits want
hope, just as
cedar boughs want
to be coaxed out of needled soils
to open under the sun.
I still believe
the sighs of ancestors -
borne on winds
of wisdom
consternation and sadness,
believe and watch
stars and bars churned, shredded
in shoals swollen; whipped like
the old woman who kneels
on the bar, hair
in the wind --
tattered and torn.
She prays for more rain.
My father’s sister sleeps in shadows. Here
psyche and soma dance in motes on the border
Her parents straddle two worlds.
In both, her father’s stubborn rage consumes him.
Here, where she passes to, cocked wrists, arched hands relax.
The ancestors chuckle at insistencies of rules and rote.
Her brothers find their father’s god too hard to please.
I lack diligence at the keyboard she masters.
Plumosa and Gardenia float over vows on the shore while the world is at war.
The sunken room is her vessel, Chopin’s Etudes her manifest.
Her husband draws his bow in the piano’s curved hip
where French doors never open to the pear tree’s fragrance.
Rag pickers songs sound like interludes among her scales.
Her mother straddles two worlds -- frets over Rebecca’s fluttering hands.
In the city by the lake, a fragile girl outlives her siblings, her Saul.
Tonight her fingers dance notes in the shadows.