Nine Poems from “A Thing or Two: A Sequence of 33 Untitled CADAE (Pi) Poems” 

Butterfly
lands
on butterfly 

bush. 

A starving man eats
maggots, dies. When two days later he
is found
new maggots have begun 

hatching in his mouth.

Which image
will you take to bed
like a lover for the first time
touching and turning it all through night? 
Which will be there when you wake?

If I could
I
would live in it— 

this

crudely-built bird house
of scarred worm wood balanced just beyond
the reach
of my extended arm— 

or at least visit

once or twice
to confirm what I have no firm basis to believe:
the floors are lined with soft white feathers
the walls painted sixteen greens.

Ovenbird—
named
for the hollowed-

out

walls of its chamber
of gaucho adobe, mud furnace
balanced
on the arm of a tree.

An industry bird.

One is what
one does, I suppose.
Builders build, herders herd. But he
who wonders, “Does this diminish us?”—
What is he for wondering?

Imagine
some
body you would 

love 

to fuck then try to
find this body somewhere in the world
and while
you look and encounter 

as you are bound to

encounter
one disappointment
after another imagine
just how thin and stripped of incident
your life would be otherwise.

In Egypt
cows
swallow other 

cows

and become thinner.
Some say this was just a dream but dreams
happen
in the space of the mind 

and the mind that dreamed

was dreaming
Egypt in Egypt
and knew upon waking the dream
as something remembered of something 
coming to swallow Egypt.

Robert Bly
stands 
seven feet tall 

at

the foot of my bed
reading a poem about a man
who lost
his yellow handkerchief 

in a red meadow.

It’s not one
of his better ones
but it’s not all that bad either.
Do you like my tiny fingers? Yes. Then I’ll write you another.

The music
stopped
for a moment 

then—

when we began
to savor in its absence silence—
started
again, maybe a bit 

louder than before

or maybe
we only heard it
as such, a sudden intrusion
we had previously not noticed
and this is what disturbed us.

Of course not
said
the militant 

mouse:

ambivalence is
a door to destruction if not the—
and the
only thing worse than that 

would be decadence.

Of course not
said the subtle cat
for he agreed or disagreed
and might have made his feelings clear but
yawned with one eye closed, then slept.

Things stay green
for
such a short time. 

Time

is a lousy word
for poems that are all about it
and most
poems certainly are. 

Let’s try this again:

Things stay green
for such a short while
then turn disappear and return
in abundance as if “everywhere”
distracts the eye from “ever.”

[All excerpts were previously published in The Burning Door, Tiger Bark Press, 2014.]