Ms. Dog

Key is justify nothing &

I've learned from living here

Harden yourself but don't

Be bull-headed, I know poetry

& my art will spit in yr face

Surprise! It's poison! Or

It drips. Either accomplishes

My task: I know pantoum,

Villanelle, sonnet-sad phrases

I know Ms. Dog, blood running

From her fingertips, jumped

To her death to save her art

Which is not my art.

Most, Anne included, do not make it

Over the ledge

Without a field of daffodils

Filled with cotton gloves

For real

The only thing

Worth dreams

Is brick

Stacked

Snake-high

Over the river.

That's a wall, That's a bridge

If

A cigar can be a cigar

Then

Anything at all can be a wall

Logic and ledges meet here, where

Ill-tipped teeth scoff at common parlance

Knocking fingers idolized in railcars

In hollow things floating down stream

The black kid beating the sugary silence with his lips.

Here the dream meets what it is not

And the wall is just a ledge

Again

The flowers are yellow there and there

And there, but not

And

I don't remember anything rhyme

Where did, what did mother teach?

There is no reason to spit

May I call this afraid?

My back to the washed cave wall

Here there are no drawings or songs

Cities or falls, there are daffodils implied

Just inside the suns comport

But

The meaning of pastoral, ode wanders

That we unlearn

and that and that, that

Our heads swing wildly

Again

Beasts beyond chalky thought

We emerge hot and fast, redouble

Our thousand eyes blast the horizon

Cracking, baked beasts

Ledgeless & so far from Anne, now

Mired in an hour of night

We dare not describe thick, scum-like

The river beside out home does not replenish

It is a bridge, it is a wall, it is a bridge

It is the many hands of a friend, it is

toe-to-heel, toe-to-heel, it is curling

about the bed we share, just once for an old friend

and then, head swinging wildly, shakes off a dream.