remnant memory

This remnant ark, this hollowed horse
where you hid to hear the owls and
squander blood in the begging bowl
of your hands, it is here you curse
with lightest breath, drift as eye-flicker
in tall grass by the creek with its moving shells,
it is here. Each torn day it is here,
you tick at it with fingers first dabbed
in stiff ink made by what you hold
in your palm, stain-wise. Ten thousand
light-years from now your mother scuttles
on her back to see what you saw:
a man in animal head, shaken, raw.

***

This is a revision of a poem that remains elusive. I doubt it is finished, or even barely begun. Something about an ancient rite is felt here. More than that I am unable to offer specifics. This will probably never appear in any collection, so I give it here a kind of burial.

another house wherein stones are thrown

or on the verge of



Hid hard within the corn valve
we heard the heart surgeon huffing near,
we fanned low toward the pond then barn
and thru its door-yaw

into hay smell,
clambered up ladder to loft to look out
some small window.
The planks felt good to be on.

We can get im.
We each had rocks to throw at the heart surgeon.
Darcy had his sling shot, Arthur his bb gun.
Don't shoot him, Arthur. That's dumb.

But me and Darcy wanted Arthur to shoot
the heart surgeon with his gun.
We seen his shadow we seen his gait.
Loudly amid the noondday blaze

him treading our way. Whistling.
We hated that the most.
Sweat, straw and dust, beating in the blood.
Empires at stake and us just there.