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plates,
    mounted a stunted horn
    on my riveted nape
    like a hairy twist of ice cream.
    Hardly accurate, but it shocked the crowd,
    half the battle in making a name.
    I guess raw profit’s why
    the master from Nuremburg
    wrought a woodcut,
    not a painting, guessing sales
    from copies wouldn’t be outcharted
    until the advent of Farrah
    Fawcett. And to compensate
    for investors’ losses
    when the carcass washed up
    against the Ligurian coast,
    they put it on display
    ‘stuffed with straw.’

Talk
    I thought I’d see you at one
    of the shows this summer. If so,
    talk might have gone in a million
    directions, and been awkward, as we’d likely
    keep it small, complaining of the lineups
    at the beer tent, then finding
    a break in the crowd to slip away.
    Talk was never our problem;
    all those late-night think-tanks
    after closing the bar, cooking up
    subtleties on invented games,
    rules to ‘Quick Drinks’
    or ‘Etch-a-Sketch Portraits.’
    Though most talk was art – what might
    be good and where to find it –
    while we watched the floor dry,
    squashed in the booth
    with the lights turned low.
    I know you,
    so was less and less surprised
    when you sidestepped
    issues people tried to raise,
    and worse, twisted them
    into betrayal by your stubborn,
    bottled-up imagination. They
    were trying to show they cared
    even while you bulldozed into rooms,
    grim as a defeated army.
    Meanwhile, work is work,
    late home, five hours sleep,
    coffee, then a nap. You’ve missed
    a birth or two, the filled and emptied diapers
    of friends’ burping offspring,
    and I’ve moved, so if you ever
    picture me, I don’t know where.
    Mostly, when I think of you, I see
    you angry and mistaken.
    Almost daily, I bike past
    your old studio
    and the re-rented house,
    rooms where our unsuspecting ghosts
    still drink and smoke, contra Yeats,
    imperfect on every count.

Silkworms
    Home-grown for extra income,
    they’re warmed in the watts
    of a standard light bulb
    till the egg forms a worm,
small
    like a hair
. Each one feasts
    on mulberry, a month-long course
    of shiny leaves, chubbing themselves
    into a pale, lazy wiggle.
    They wish to be a kimono cloud,
    ball of fog, white
    shrouds spun for their own ghosts
    as they nod off to a creaking dream
    of legs and wings. They wish
    they were metaphor.
    To let them stretch would tear
    sleek work, so each cocoon
    is dropped in a rolling boil, their
    lives pinched out like fingers
    on a match head.
    The strands are reeled on a row
    of spools,
    and the cocoons jig and iridesce
    until the corpse is undressed.

‘There’s Where the American Helicopters Landed’
    Sixtyish, wrinkled, Ling Quang’s hard look
    lifts from the gravel where we’ve stopped,
    the Honda’s kickstand staked
    to the road’s thin shoulder,
    our helmets laid like eggs on the leather seat.
    He points at the place
    near the silk factory where
    the craters are almost overgrown,
    green tangles scanned
    through his knock-off Ray-Bans.
    On the bike, I forget to lean
    through curves, tires
    eating the steep grade back to town,
    past the bridge again
    where a man stands fishing,
    nylon net like a smudge of mist
    that skims his catch from the creek,
    their fins struggling in the killing air.

End Times
    In the tangled field, our boots catch.
    Barns wedged in thick weeds
    are beached container ships
    wrought in rusted brick, dust, rot whiff
    of hay bales. A black stork
    rigs straw on a transmission post
    that sags with dead wire.
    A wolf curls on a park bench,
    sneers through cleft lips.
    There’s a trace of skew
    in the oak leaves’ lost symmetry.
    The pond is hummingbird green.
    •
     
    The car’s waved through; a triangle
    signs the split where we yield
    to nothing but silence. On the bridge,
    corroded guardrails
    fence the phantom view
    of burning graphite.
    Eleven flagpoles spoke
    the drive at the only hotel.
    The air rings, metal
    lashed by slack chains.
    Pine and spruce glut the playground,
    split the ball