Lamp and Duck
Back, red-burnt and bagged by fleas. Knapsack full of mutter and flub. An antique, a journeycake, johnnycake, a youngun’s food. One walks and walks over hard ribbed sand. Or rounded stones, algae-slick. One is waist-deep, surrounded by miles of water.
One goes off and sees nary a pencil, nary a paper, and one returns half-crazed with words. Spilt into the already-spoilt present, sucked up out of a fleet past gone. See Proust. One is startled by irrevocable “coverage”—how the goats one butts up
against daily look crocked, snooty urns of butter pre-churned. They’s a world—yea, several—out there inhabitable. Where the auctioneer bangs the gavel: whole frigging worlds get sold in lots. A kind of unrelenting mythomania covers one’s tracks.
“Inspected a yellow fang”: two hummingbirds perching on a white pine limb, perfect horizontal, two thumbs up, two snapped-off twigs. It takes a kitchen to make a village, we pierced a trout with a green bough sharp, turned it against its convection, unbuffered.
