In the Rain on Fern HIll

  

Over the road to the third,

spider lines over my face as

the day expires

in crows and doves.

This is the gunshot hour.

Buttercups and blisters,

fires warm the home-schooled,

knives with horn handles and Jeeps

and none of that in the end, waste

of an afternoon, so a walk in

a greasy wind, a squirrel in

the clutch of a hawk,

red on red.

Four-wheelers run where

the barbed wire's been snipped,

following the line back to Texas,

when the dog coming back

reeks of 'cat, do you follow?

Give it up. Things must not

be clear, in love with the

off-kilter, must not be clear.

Delogify, invade language,

awkwardness is the thing.

Do not follow. Flow.

Gleaming black jacket

in the rain on fern hill,

pores so small in the skin of a horse

its hide is right for the road,

the road to the third, you recall.

I remember the moths

battering themselves

against the bulb,

dusting us with

scale until we shone,

and the whole timeless

summer wept for

joy behind glass.

— a bricolage in the method of Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun,

by "snipping off lengths of consciousness,"
as in the poetry of John Ashbery.