Beyond this crusty diagram
In the swamp-panties of your early handwriting
Beyond the freckles and malty foam crested with
Teary fleur-de-lis guarding little tales of the chamber
Whispered where dreams and cookbooks twitch and meld cavorting
Curves your ghostly romance
It springs upon your bedtime tilting
Frosty and sweetgum scented the better to grip
Your rocking old calendars and harmonica filterings
Your tawny grin wafting through this batter of keepsakes
Your vessel of unfettered smells
It's a horsesugar memoir airborne from groves dripping
Keystone fancies and throbbings
The room is singing its distillations of your nakedness
Sentimental in tinctures of your toe jam and lilted spices
Your big cheeks turning the late night frisky
To later sob from its gnawed depths
As the leaky trance rolls on
As your reverie squeezes candlelight
As you caress your old shoes in curlicued reverie
As the moon envies your creamy shatterings
As you wring tears from the phantom whose glimmer
Now seizes you.
MIDNIGHT SAFEKEEPING
The stairs are jangling my pillow away
Out to star-drilled grasses and card games in one-room schoolhouses
All bundled for midnight safekeeping
The rafters whistle with clotted windpipes
Puffing notions of faraway lore out memoir portals
Where terror-varnished episodes glare into view
Like TV signals from 1959 suddenly landing for broadcast
Upon little fields and wall-eyed alleys
Quavering the same old fabric of lost stores and cinnamon alcoves
Right up your tight chimney
Sans the napkins, too
Call it my twilight language of grisly intimations
And sentimental Fortean hanky-panky unwrapped in Victorian mansions
It's how Greeley, Nebraska croons its angelhood in 1894 and 2006 simultaneously
And Mankato, Kansas falls in love with me all over again for the first time
Tell the constellations that Cornell is expecting us
That the girls are singing "Joseph" no matter the name
Tell the prairie chickens that Scott Kirby roves the wires of their fancy brains
Converting sod to moons and grass to marzipan
While snow gathers jacks upon his infinite dining table
Remind them of my 12:07 return
When the decades huddle adoringly
And the inanimate world resumes its kissing me all over
For the leer of this mighty dream parlor
Now descending