REBURIAL

Out of the corner of my eye

I see the protests, the wind sings

the numbers of the planes, streets

are filled with subatomic bodies. 

Thirteen remain in New York City

Bureau's custody, artifacts now

stripped of their sin.  Objects

of a strange new sympathy.

The dead who caused the deaths

of two thousand nine hundred odd,

are themselves forgotten by-

products of the act.  The names

are no longer attached to these

faces, decayed into their rubber

sacks.  Perfectly preserved as history,

nothing physical survives.  Their

memorial is the empty cavern of the sky.

INCIDENT IN A RESTAURANT

Not violently, but as in an ancient

Egyptian glyph, eyes awry, the man

at the corner table twists his head 

just so, full view to shoulders and then

information lost in his torso.  He turns

in incidental directions, while his friend

holds his face firmly in his hands,

speaking in undertones so the murmur

of the restaurant consumes them.

We try to place our heads inside his,

gear to staccato fits and starts, see nothing

in the social haze, the body a cradle or cave,

a place where a remote neighbor lives. 

Fraternities condemn the clonic dancer

for his intimate vexation, confuse their plight

with his, or with the moon waning in stages,

give advice, a pale placebo in the blood,

a belladonna, digitalis, ergot or strychnine. 

Think the universe has marked him with

its iron, tapped his spine to watch the insects

battle for the diocese of his skull.  But

there in the first darkness before science

they bow down. In the corner of my eye

(that lately has begun to twitch), his hand

smashes a plate and that's it.  Time to leave

his friend says.  Rising to his feet,

loose thighs in baggy pants intimate

traumas of a botched birth, fertility drugs

of hope, flailing deep in primal seas that

spring us all up unshelled, gilless creatures. 

He whips himself as if at flies in his corner

of the universe, and we blunt our bodies

against the godhead, and fumble with

our glasses as the messenger pays the bill.

THE PIG FARM

            On the Alentejo, Portugal

From across the meadow I hear

the low, angry retort to some crude

act some other pig has done.

The screams are like the songs

of going to slaughter, but I know

they are simply the spoken words

pigs use in their daily dealings.

And tomorrow all will be dirt again,

and back to biting hind legs and ears.

I'm grateful for the choir, days

when the pigs hear the metal clang

of bucket against trough, and

thankful for their quarreling too, as if

this were the last city in the world,