Day to Start on the Floorboards, Rain to the South, Any View a Machine
By David Lau
Negative, chalk (how I first saw
your sign) reads like smoke signals.
Has an extensive collection of glasses.
On this side of the earth, no sides:
where we practice our marksmanship,
like soldiers in the city square, on corpses,
no matter many beetles in the grass.
Find it.
Obstinately refuse to grasp.
The spades, today valiantly shouldered,
submerge in the unprofitable patch.
Beetles are back-up plan zero,
the if I were you thing inside
the water container,
which is too blind to trust with the wheel,
to leave alone, even if in for the eve.
The wounds we gave ourselves
have just begun us,
irreligious, and are the deterrents,
as escarpments, of else but warlike heads.
Go get your own aquarium, each fin becoming
coiled beneath the bus, cruising along.
There you'll find the nasal passage.
Ask the operator for extreme commitment
from the lamp shade
to the table, all reflected in the unwashed window.
Table of omens. Flotation devices murmured
and murdered.
The shutters of thunder are forlorn
like the song of the sound of my own voice: a different tattooed country.
Nationalism.
At the rally, everybody's grin gives away two bags.
All are watered, her body slipping
out from under the dripping awning, effortlessly.
David Lau, "Day to Start on the Floorboards, Rain to the South, Any View a Machine" from Virgil and the Mountain Cat. Copyright © 2009 by David Lau. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press.
Source:
Virgil and the Mountain Cat
(University of California Press, 2009)
