A swatch of puce carpet, a monochromatic
driveway full of cars, and an island of
blue corduroy, sought here and there,
claimed for the king, the roy; and the viceroy
ducked back into one of the three rooms
you’ve been escorted to. In the room,
music per filth, with article one of
Gross Loneliness: The Memoirs, you drink
house wine galore, you file away all the injurious
dreams that contour a peasant’s back,
start afresh with the hope that you’ll come out
on the right side of criminal; a grand hope,
the comfortable linens of Vindication, Yes!,
you are not guilty for history, no one
is, but it’s not that simple. Kitchens
are made of the blood and bone
of criticism. In a dream, Yvor Winters
has tried your whole family for high treason,
and there is a fiddle-player, first pizzicato,
then a double stop, and your family,
all mashed together like a porphyritic
rock, and you as a fragment of this
are launched into stratospheric
and blessed thanksgiving, until you reach
the pinnacle of your arc; penitent
like the fallen angelic orders, you proffer
the better part of your anatomy; the tanned
and wrinkled face of an elder blushes
as he hands you the calumet, smoke
your self, smoke your loins, your
powdered ankle, your cognition, do it
to the hilt, and so you have
reached the height of your arc and you rain
down on fallow land, this fallow land they
prepared by excoriating the trees
to strangle them of nutrients and now
it’s rain again, your family has been
unpacked from the suitcase into which
they were compressed, and they sit at a
dated Formica table, your father the focal
point, he unfolds his legs, and your mother
blows him up like an inner tube, and he
says, spitefully, Yvor Winters is a hermit.
The kitchen seems to be alive, and the hermit
dances with your mother, and she is
rather vulnerable to his advances, and the one
girl, the tall glass of water, knows a nausea and
the kitchen seems to be alive with regret
and now your mother kisses the hermit
innocently, and your sister kisses the cake
decorator, and the cake decorator uncoils
like the serpent, of plumage, and all the trees
explode into color of jackal, of leg of ham,
and in Seattle it’s raining, and the weatherman
means really raining, an inch per second and all
is heading the way of Atlantis, and Aqualad
we love you, but there is no time for facades,
so tell the weatherman to grab the anchorwoman,
tell them to enjoy each other, carnally,
in the broom closet, and in Seattle it is raining,
and I mean really raining; the tall glass of water
has spilled, are you really so contained
these days, have you not bled a bit outside your
boundaries? And the cake decorator slithers
and the bombardier lets him, just plain
lets him slide out the hatch and this rain of snakes,
of vermin, of ghastly love and overpriced elevator,
this serpentine suggestion attires the people
of Abraham, all wearied and pleasantly mystic.
There is an assembly of people prone:
rise up Guyana, rise up through the atrocity
like birthday candles through the slick
resin of oily, rain-drenched streets, of
the iridescent streets, of the puddles in which
rainbows are merely the manifest content
of some great saga, of the snake pouring his guts
out to his mother, smug in her armchair, her grey
hair frosted to achieve the newest color of
the spectrum, some armored grey, with a tincture
of blonde, so that what’s manifest to both
the snake and the mother is that within each bracket,
or within each grade, an infinity of degrees
are wedged, and it’s subtle and incremental,
so the transition from the Romantic to the
Modern is not so hideous and apparent,
but buffered, and the interregnum is marked
by peace, a day in which the historians recorded
nothing, the long placid day ebbed into a new
one, and the choice was simple and local, not
at all cataclysmic; breakfast would be served;
meantime, there was a sartorial impasse, and
the whole house held its breath, like some
derelict paper bag huffing its way across
a parking lot, stops here to catch its breath
and then the wind picks up again, and in this way
the house held its breath, all the consultants–
the artists and savants–watched their opinions
blow on an upward draft, blow and be sifted
like a common detritus, until the tailor,
illuminated by epiphany, the edges of his person
gilt and radiant, said decisively, Cords,
Cords to the king! Let’s eat scones and gargle tea!