The work tastes overwhelmed, like alert palms flanking a full highway.

How you find the grit later in your mouth & wake into

your own enormity. How the work takes an unexpected amount of right turns

that run into the darkness & peter out under abandoned bridges.

To the Massachusetts from which I come, my brother-country racked by cobblestones

that left me sprained, I leave my brain

infused with slick bottom stones where three rivers converge. Men in hip-boots

pull breaching trout from the surface.

The work is as barbarous as bookends. Waterspouts deviated by a tough wind,

as if we could jump up into our wings, hold a pitch to the point of ownership

& scatter as sure as light.

Though I was willingly broken by the grandeur, I made not one exception,

too taken by a trumpet taking stabs at Gershwin, the faults repeats passing

in on a breeze. Yet I was often awakened by a horrid kind of surprise

into my primary image (a small brook that borders a deaf school).

Having worked a summer holiday for belladonna, I thought my sight was proof.

I believed all the endings curved into the choirmaster's slender fingers

which formed a closed circle against the darkened faces of the crowd.

Yet I stared at a map for a year & could only remember the colors of countries.

The work followed me like the carcasses of road-kill I counted while passing

through Colorado. Two days in, the toll mounted to unhumorous heights. 284

was lifted from the asphalt by a hawk just before the grill of the car. The work

was like that, both skyward and lifeless.