Talking Soul and Soil, with Abraham Smith and Matthew Neill Null

This special feature—spotlighting poet Abraham Smith—includes a conversation between Smith and acclaimed fiction writer Matthew Neill Null about Smith’s latest book, Destruction of Man (Third Man Books, 2018); a video of Smith yowling poetry as only he can do; a playlist put together by the poet himself; and a selection of his recent work. Take a peek into rural America through the warped-wonderful lens of Smith’s verbal magic.

NULL: I’m curious about your writing process. Do you speak the poem first? Your book has such a musical quality that I imagine it being sung and percussed into existence rather than written in ink (or typed, as it were). I ask because the front matter name-checks Basil Bunting, and I didn’t really “get” his epic poem Briggflatts until I heard him chant it in that wonderful Northumberland lilt.

SMITH: I am a daily spirit sprint sprite sort. Motion tends to beget word commotion. So I’ll pace the house or walk one recyclable at a time outdoors or trot a little hill trot and that’ll tend to get the words grasshoppering around up and down through my tender maniac noggin. May be that I nudge one word or sputter 700—either way, I tend to sit to it with a candle spluttering nearby, in morning times. My bones turned to tongues and larynx spit and ears when I was pretty young. I’m a longtime yowler now. Dylan Thomas was an early totem to hope to steal a tuneful splinter from. And Roethke. And J. Rhys. And V. Woolf. And Leadbelly. And Woody Guthrie. Ecstatic people through whom I stethoscoped both a windy confetti rhapsody and petrified basalt saltine sadness. I am not sure that I say the poems aloud all of the time these days, but I can feel their sonic tonics in my cuticles. I am a chanter live so the words and how they ribbon and situate on the page have to have a certain buoyancy and durability because they are going to get chipped and kicked at once I start in on bronco’ing ’em live. Percussed is right. I tend to corkscrew around in my chair while I write, and I hopscotch this repetitive motion with my right hand once I am into final revisions, jazzwise. So writing for me is a very bodied clatter. Ah and this is a very old keyboard plugged into this Mac. From the latest 2002 or so, or so I am guessing—makes a helluva racket anyhow. Like hail on glass. Or sparrows tap-dancing with thimbles on their sparrow feet on a cookie sheet and it is greased.

NULL: You’re a farmer and a poet. I’m sure this was common once, but surely not now. Reading your book, I found myself thinking back to the fourteenth-century allegorical poem William’s Vision of Piers Plowman, in which the righteous plowman teaches pilgrims how to live right and plow the half-acre—the amount of land needed in medieval England to produce enough bread for a single adult to survive a year. I found myself drawing lessons from Destruction of Man, but I’m wondering, Did you intend for it to have an allegorical element? There does seem to be a moral exploration at its core about the way we use the land.

SMITH: Yes, that farmer-poet angle has been a far piece gone timewise, true. That said, go sit in the basement of the bank and you’ll tend to run into a pretty big crowd of Rusk County writing club enthusiasts. We farmed a long while, but the farm just died this last year and a half or so. So the release of the book roughly coincides with the decease of our farm. Or at least its dramatic downsizing. And a land sell-off to boot such that my family financially could stay. I am not sure there’s a CEO out there whose job is more complicated and many-hat-ed than the farmer’s. Here’s a brief list of the juggled musts and mustards the farmer wizard must span: mighty business acumen, masterful financial-management acuity, stellar tinkerer of half-dead and dastardly cantankerous machines, vet, expert whisperer of fellow mortal-coil mammals, and I am only winding up with a first whiffy finger pointed near what a farmer must be or else. Destruction is a catechistic and moral astral-spelunk indeed. When you are not waltzing on concrete all day, your steps do dig in. And it’s not possible when turning over and over the land to misdiagnose what’s under your fingernail—that’s the land there blackening or a mix of your scratched bugbit skin and topsoil and subsoil and grease. Every step you take across the barnyard, every next step, sinks in. You don’t really have the chance to unplug from the arc of your choices. Though farmers, just like other sorts of humans, do. Most of the guys in my county will tell you that animals don’t have emotions. But most of the guys in my county have 8,873 stories about the exquisitely zany or tomfoolery ornery personalities of the animals beside whom and through whom they muddle on through. Because I wear this second poet hat, I suppose, I lease intuiting antennae and the second sight of the stranger—so I’ve tended to turn off like a farmer while weaning lambs, then tune in like a writer or agitator or advocator to the excruciating blues decibels the lambsongs rise to: and there is no peace-prince lute a-pluckin’ there and then.

NULL: What lessons can farming teach a writer? What do you hear out there in Ladysmith?

SMITH: I think of it less as lessoning and more about how one tendrils into the other. Farming is ritual. You’ll hear people say it’s rote. And you’ll hear some farming people bemoan their landlocked fate: forever tether-chained to the farm. There’s no vacation from farming. There’s no vacation from poetryland either. I name it a deep and dear honor to visit with writing every day. They elide in that sense of ongoingness. There’s that old Emerson line about how you can’t go looking for beauty. That the moon’ll turn to tinsel if you head out to get zapped by its owlface sterlings. Ah but accidental beauty intervenes and intercedes—snares you unawares while you are out and about upon your necessary journeys. Gusted down. I have found that to be so true in farming or lumberjacking or what have you. To my mind god is watching a coyote nibble the mice the bine minces and casts while I am cutting hay. And I can’t tell you all that I have learned in my chats with toads rising up out of the sawdust like mermaids from Keatsian casements while I am out on the woodpile chopping wood. When you are dealing with old equipment, absolutely nothing proceeds linearly. And there’s a lot of zag to my writing as well. We talk about breakdown time in farming. And I suppose my poems are forever breaking down in ways that delight and surprise and send me deeper into the sonic tinkerer vein. So there’s a lot that sloshes back and forth between the farming and writing buckets. Each wearing grooves upon the other. What sounds don’t I hear out there? The NASA popsicle-drool tunes of coyotes. The vertigo shivers of peepers in spring. The long straw chock-full of dry beans lala’ing and goggling in the sandhill-crane croons. Ah and the sneezes of the trilliums quaking in the woods. Ahem and my cusses while the deerfly rain and reign. And yes the hyena yodelings of the chainsaw. And yes the tinman yawn of the heartless mailbox.

NULL: That’s a heartbreaker about the end of your farm. It must have been strange to write this book during such a fraught time. How do you write about farming without romanticizing it? Is that even possible? When I’m writing about old times, I remind myself that my friend Phyllis’s mom, a farm woman, said that the happiest day of her life was when she could buy sliced bread at the store.

SMITH: Yes, the book is a pastoral elegy. So I suppose it’s an elegy for an elegy. Or an elegy in triplicate. Or an ELELELELELEGY. Hopefully that’s what I was up to regarding no romantical airbrush. Aimed to give the reader a nip of diesel at the mouth and the flamenco of the bluebag at the teat. Now see gutbusted, wore-out people heaving empty wine-cooler bottles into the silo. Now hear the glass say “glass,” which translates rather tight-neat-knit-loosely to this: yourexquisitechandelierisbullshit. 

NULL: The poem is lush with animal life: the hawk and the horseflies, the mice and the oxen. I began flipping through, trying to find a page that didn’t have an animal, and I couldn’t do it! How conscious was this? Did you plan to feature them so prominently? I have been teaching John Berger’s essay “Why Look At Animals?,” focusing on how industrial capitalism ruptured the close relationship between humans and animals. Most of my students are from suburbia, and in their worlds, animals come in two forms: coiffed, beloved pets or shrink-wrapped meat in the grocery case. That seems super fucked-up to me.

SMITH: I hear you there. The disconnections and dissociations are mighty robust and, as you say, fucked-up tragic. Cue the maudlin mandolin. And Aldo Leopold, who sang: ecosystem means family of things. Everything’s forever running away into the sky or down a hole. Cutting hay invites the coyote and hawk and crow and hustles the deer no longer wanting anywhere near the deafenings of the tractor. Taking a jog over little blind eyes of gravel invites the bear. Invites the tamarack bog to rice-toss deerfly horsefly mosquito gnat ETC. Ah but there in your peripherals as you run for the life of your skin, there is the whale-blubber white of the trillium lobbin rubbin tubbin thumpin butter in your very eyes.

NULL: I was admiring the photographs that accompany the poem, and now I see you took them! Are these from Ladysmith?

SMITH: Yessir, they are. We are all photo zealots, it seems, in 2018, with our fancy phonic faux-knee ways. But yeps, my dad, Richard Smith, is a whale of a photographer, and my mom, Linda Detra, is a grand painter, so I come by my stare-and-click eyes by blood. When I was in grade school—that hallowed first go-around of the buttons on the denim jackets—I possessed a button upon which was written, in a dangerous cursive: SHOOT ANIMALS WITH CAMERAS. Goddddamn, was I popular up there in the camo-mojo northwoods!

NULL: What did you listen to while composing Destruction of Man? Anyone lucky enough to attend a reading of yours can tell that music is as important to you as the written word. It’s like William Blake come a tent preacher—a good tent preacher.

SMITH: Thanks so much, M! Talking about lucky, if the readers of this interview don’t know your books, then hie to your local bookstore, y’all, hie and hasten! You can thank me next time I see you so loudly that even I, a somewhat tractor-deaf trembler, will ear you. As for tuneyards and tunebards, I listened to a canteen/potable of my pantheon: Blind Willie Johnson and Mississippi Fred McDowell and Greg Brown and Geeshie Wiley and Chris Whitley and TVZ and Washington Phillips and Mance Lipscomb and Bill Morrissey and RL Burnside and Courtney Marie Andrews and Drive-By Truckers and Jason Isbell and the list bonfires on: anything rough but some things soothing—tunes that sounded like tryin to use a cattail for a toothpick or baling twine for molar floss.

NULL: Representative line: “chemical hell money axes / history of people penny pinchers …” Rural America, by most measures, is in decline. While seventy-five percent of our country is rural space, that space has just seventeen percent of our population. What’s the future for Ladysmith and places like it? Are we ready to stack the chairs, or are you hopeful? I’m pretty glum, myself.

SMITH: Most years see most of the graduating folks from Ladysmith High School heading out. The most scholastically promising might go to Madison or Minneapolis. And plenty of other strong students stick closer to home at UW Eau Claire or Stout or River Falls, and the UW campus list roars or—thanks, Scotty Walker!—trickles on. Almost none of those folks come back except for holidays. Ladysmith is around about the size it was when I was a kid. But we’ve lost the good-pay, unioned-up factory jobs and we’ve lost a cool small college—Mount Senario dying pretty well guttered our diversity and gutted a whole lot of xenophobia-lessening tendencies. And hell, good luck finding a young plumber. That said, we do have a very cool relatively new arts space in my town called the Toad House where folks gather to eat a tip of soup and sip a coffee, and we have a nice little farmers’ market where my brother-in-law’s dad might sell you some sheep cheese, where you can hear the old people piss and moan about a few-dollar price tag on a dozen eggs, and you can probably buy a Packer’s green-and-gold–crocheted yarn koozie for your seventh PBR of the first half. Probably most of my classmates from LHS, folks rarer to return, might just name their old home a sullied dead uncrystal unmirth meth half-ass spiral swirling down. I suppose I bop back so often that I see it as the same old rowdy old cutover northwoods in a way. Wanna arm-wrestle? But yes most of the folks moving in are relatively unskilled laborers and loiterers. And yes there’s no money around. And yes guys are gonna show up tomorrow to the metal dump trying to get cash for a manhole cover from midnight from main street. And yes the fentanyl-bird’s tune is willkill willkill willkill and yes devil meth is hoppin around in the pulpy and blown hearts of many a soul there right this millisecond. Guess country life has gone to heaven in a handbasket with a grenade for a goiter, but I suppose I feel a hopeful twinge more than mire and murk any day I see an eagle or bear. In fact, seeing a bear always restarts my life. In that sense I’ll be younger and dumber than I was yesterday this summer. Rusk County black bears being jumper cables for my soul.

NULL: A section of this poem is called “Country Music,” and it made me think of how “country living” is being portrayed through the Pro Tools lens of Nashville: that slick redneck, Gawd-and-the-flag, tequila-hedonism stuff with a processed guitar solo. To my eye, your work is a more accurate portrayal of country life, richer in dirt and detail and complication, but let’s put ourselves in the point of view of, say, the blue-collar dude in Ladysmith who just picked up tickets to the Jason Aldean concert. He likes that stuff on the radio. He sees himself in those songs. He’s saving up for a lift kit. When you encounter these dudes, do they recognize themselves in your work? How do they respond? Your work is avant-garde in the best sense of the word, in that it wants to evolve new forms and happily challenges the reader, so I’m interested in responses to your work from non-arty types.

SMITH: Yeps, mainstream country these days is an airplane fashioned from barf bags. Every time I hear it, I mistake it for a commercial. Once your songs are ads, then you know it’s time to pack up your EKG machine and your little tiny reflex rubber hammer cuz your tock don’t tick and your knee ain’t about to spasm-leap again. Sighfully I haven’t had the chance to read for those average country Joe folks too often. The mainstream country-music lover doesn’t tend to seek out or get dragged to a poetry reading, fractured and culturally fractious as that is to say. But I run into their kids and cousins all of the time in cities and university towns, and they tend to come up after the reading to say that yes, they recognized the threads and old dog teeth of their growing-up lives squirreling through my poems. And I am certain that the average rural Joe and Jill and Jim and Brandi would catch scent and sight of herself and himself in this book as it’s so much a vernacular’d book rather totally rhinestoned by their very ways of getting love’s preenings and cuss’s keenings up and out through the head. Last summer, after asking around other places up there for years, I gave my first reading in Ladysmith at the Toad House. A fellow hanged around after and proffered this: your poems remind of what every house has—a junkdrawer. I suppose a person could find the broken chicken bone of offense in that. But I took his insight as wisest spot-on bull’s-eye: because I trust the sound in the poems to forge a flimsy trail, my poems are random-seeming gatherings of useful things all touching weirdly in that sweet little purgatory called a drawer—chucked in there, second drawer down, three drawers to the east of the sink. Get your scotch tape, a tack, fourteen paperclips, a lighter, three bent-up joker cards, some left-handed scissors, and a key chain forged out of cut antler here!

NULL: I logged three years out in the heartland, and while I don’t want to give in to stereotype, I found rural Midwestern reserve and decorum to be very real—the average person just wasn’t loquacious in the way I was used to in West Virginia. Silence was a prevailing value. But you are a great talker, a vocalist, a silence breaker. The word is all. Do you come from a family of talkers and singers? Or are you rebelling against all that silence?

SMITH: You’re right. Babies in the Midwest are born with a little Elmer’s glue at the maw. Folks’ll tend to mm’hm you a little more than they’ll hell-yes you. Sure there’s some of that traditional phlegmatic reticence in my family. But half of my people are from Houston and points easterner in among the pines in Texas. So I grew up hearing my Aunt Dianne when she was tired of talking and searching for an excuse to get off the phone saying, Well, sugar, I best get back to my rat killin, as much as I grew up hearing mm’hm. And maybe the decorous sound-cancelin DNA is a little false as every generalization ultimately is—a little gauzy and thin. Or maybe where I am from is a little more feral than Iowa, say. RUSK: Land of arm-wrestlin brandy gulpers whose children tend to be named Brandi. Brandy and Brandi, mm’hm. Land of Megadeath and Metallica and Warrant and Ratt and AC/DC crotchrocketin into your ear holes, mm’hm. And I’ll tell you this: good luck hearin silence at seven a.m. at any McDonald’s in any little podunk town up there. All those Lake Woebegone eighty-eight-year-old farmer dudes must’ve forgotten their mm’hm at home because their whitewhite dentures are seen to be lurchin up out of their mouths like migratin swans, so verily frothy with wide-eyed gossips are they. And I’ll tell you this: up there I have yet to hear a half a day of human hush. And this: there’s nothin like a farm for noise. And this: nothin like a farmer for flooded and flooding talk-rivers once you dip a lobe through reticence’s thinnest slush. Hopefully I am second cousin to a spring peeper a coyote wears for an eye patch while whisperin to a sandhill crane, oh sandhill, o sandhill, might you lend me your walkinstickbody for a cane for a time.

Four Poems by Abraham Smith

HEART OF THE CRANE

isn’t one
wreckless deathless repeating dove
yes it is proof

spluttering from the powerline
TB rag thrown
risk attached sash

say the dove’s permission to
pass song the conch
to crash it in song

the shell sinew not shell song
that all that isn’t tied up in
the bluet negligee and the wild onion negligee

doublebarrel flexsome bone walking
sticky rain milk meringue
of human glee secretion

it’s an operation they ran
out of laughin gas so they saw at
what’s wrong with bottle glass

with a seesaw of
with a handsaw of
vessel vanquished love

change’s eternal debate drop ya
to sleep in a flash the changeling did
drank the portico milk dry

guess when i say it right that
will be that so i try and say it half
right so to roll with carry on

on my rattlin toes at the edges of
the fire the grass blades there kneel weird
the sun fell they’re flushed now

easter grass fake now
summer fur sear now
harm warm even

let me owlet in a bottle one time
trumped up fake boo? no baby ill real
so mama to apothecary traverses

newsy dewy field she will not damp her nightdress
not an inch of pride to it
ever walked in wet? that damp

has climber’s will charm lung wrong minatory so
holds it in her mouth bitwise as tho to wade a river
but back in the woods in deeper there

potentest nightshades against her
light as not thought out chokes her off
all milk rolling easy sudden cotton camisole

qtip factory swamp up overtight
and done and gone lincolns pon the lids hnnn
so maidenless woods so rudderless throttle dove so

motherless children so dent in the river the river won’t
let hold all along here holding to the lines
apples for the hawkeyes heartbangs for the cranes

just up a little higher
on the hill in the sonorous
breasts of the big ones

tone phones for you and i
the dead calling collect the breath of a sleeping
donkey in a cartoon

the future and the past
of asthma and
of cats

dove i swear
wooden you think
to fly

focus on heave fruit
sentence bent this
way

of gasoline a match
flowers life stutters
bright from still life

surprise being
yr native
slopping fur word dove

fire you shudder
you flurry
you die to live

a longer
suture bird
la la life

IN TIMES OF LOVELY LOVE

out of or into the honest
damn random damn dandy blue
cranes jump 12 up feet straight

because they feel they feel it
because love is a juiced cartoon elevator at the bone
because love is this shined bell get at ’em

with glimmer and the marigold parable
of male empower y’all fairing and craning
at the metallurgic moon

brute spins the wooden mallet
and the brute’s baby child
does one grass blade the same and

town and city
they splay
so touchless these

opiate shit days sharing but one
tiny and tittering
meltface fentonyl willkill T

hitches his played out town jeans
wets lips stoops a little bad back
his lady her capable arms

folded over her belly
is she cold? prow calm
warm bloods hers gentle as

the hairs upon arms flow
foeless unto a liquid level spits in his hands
looks up looks down

it’s his work way of breathing
he’s right there all of him at the broke
machine at the lovebreaking into her

3 add 9 hard laughs
2 plus 12 minus 2 sprinter’s piston puffs up
6 and 6 of sorrow’s kittens cracking grin

after grin to pine god
gets so old now
but not as old as old sheets

or unwashed jeans
the purchase of yr first
washing machine being what it is

to fall in love
with humanity again
lightbulbs being immoderate stupid

lampshades being decorative useful
maybe i want to tear on in and
mouth the burning runs a little chalky dry

via that char chew lure look on people
clicking off as they enter in
to duty being nine times

out of ten one poison river
the belltower fish gunner up
and did you further know the leap

these cranes accomplish
gets rushless as the oldest trees
old man traveling flag long pole

sap slow up pug’s pug
sucking a halls the older doctor purrs
are you sitting? leper leather

leaping cept with wings
saliva swallow sleet in sleep
legless eggless egress oaken

root to oaken
trunk to oaken
bough

oak oak once up in
i want that fortune
for how i future

long time no sea
how’s yr salt intake my sweet?
guess alright

traveling mucho
writing much you are reading it
oak oak

grieve that druidic tic
tombwise in
so long

one such travailing
love bug
pikes he turns

oaking oaking
12 ticks up
per anno

attend a pendant ski to parasol
see vein must first low a pole
through the heart of leaf

see the human eye trees
what i name spineway vein
one winter one presiding

breath bone tense reps green
a vascular brocade babe
easy now on earth

to forget our bones
if not for dogs
no cows come home

magnetized to green
the dogs do lazy like shruggin teens
little heels of green brown dust

eddy via snouts in shade
as rhythms of church
organ pedals pushed

through mahogany hymns
by rising bridge waters nosed
into brightest bridal car cans

not yet clear
of the heat of
hurrahing mouths

clinking sparking
the two pick up speed
combustion theirs rivals fears

the fear thrall of thieves
of storm’s leaves pansy daisy
clover nellie button sue

promissory clabber
debt vets cud cudgel
stomach gentle giant 4

paper ships airbrushed green
paper ships nodding at
advances of water yes

twitching like that what does
one dog dream? gone alone
to fetch ’em corn bucket alien

paper ship mill coal blouses
gonna co-coax ’em with a fake
snake shake shake it

with a stir it
with a slur of the circling
whole kernel shebang

and what’s that rising
mirage lope
smoke not of resignation

why it’s weary ruth
furrow for her pillow
weeds the row tidier

than any herbicide’s
silent violent
choke vote

weeds by the grinding
her old true teeth
in a new new dream

about the town wall
was a stranger bread
then how you bite down

comes key
watch for stones with yr tongue
handholds come free

for they temper the leaven
for fallen lashes wash
for they minnow mad

bout town mouthy
valley opening testy
upon flotsam oaken oars

whose memory
hauled to gape
by broken sea

calls in its cracking
back for tacky squirrel
whose jug bean maybe what

whose jank tail in its jitters
is fires is furred is furlongs
is pulpits is puppets

god’s little eruptions
god’s fast smoke
god’s a dog adoze a dream

of better legs
sharker teeth
nose like a hurricane

WHY DANCE

none know
none have yet to stay
say much so

leaning
like cranes do
like that

like the
hungover do
like that

brain fixin
to fall
from yr nose

yes
maybe
so

the nose an antique iron
foamed with rust
thence to doorstop turned

yes
maybe
so

my prayer
may everyone one
possess juicy uses too

highly unthought out
across summer lakes
89 damselflies pantomime time

the shower has
an asshole and
that is called the grate

or drain
the hungover have eyes
like scribbles like drains like grates

gratis just
don’t happen
much these days

all the free bins
sticky with spills
murmur dismember drunk sleep

lost and founds all
floated into the sexted corners
fella coroner’s met dreams

alive and leaning little
ragged blood notebook
sheets yanked hasty

so snowy edges snaggle dang
so pages sump blanks some stained
why must we mind it so

our one beautiful body
gym made fades digital
damage leading beauty by

the nose i know a hole in
the new oak leaf limp as
the condom after

their dogtired stances
in spring in fall
just taking it all in

while the fire
in the wing eases off
off and down

crane bone
corn bone
beau light one

do so
holy loomer loom
best bent spent hanger ever

so too slight to ring or
take instruction ticks
wisper than ghost birds

picketing for seeds
upon the junked banks
of the laughs of the spiteful

curbs blacked tired kissin
drunkards’ babyface wheels
catfish licorice lupus creels

it’s dark and it’s cold and it’s real
bound car lock curse it
curse them smug keys glinting

then a wing tilts
ear of an elephant
a la the arm of a swimmer

catching sun
catching at sun
catching the sun

at it again then
could have been a cork-
screw grouses the plough

i could’ve been
just depends
you know

upon the cyclone mold
man that’s some third shift whinin
could have been a stingray

preens the cork
with the one red end
after the laughter has died down

called to fake a fate late
or faded foot upon the wall
one antediluvian holy roller

trodding my calling
i go to war
nothing

but the one red end
and a saying ascribed to mystics
addicted to petunia light

coocooing my lips
corks stop flow lord
so pure to one thing

can’t cop
natural
to a little range

some army beige
some safari khaki
some cirrhotic amarilla

some ten hundred
thousand wino corky eraser bits
pinch pink jingo this here floor

while half a noun
sick with gravity ah and
mellow as a pencil drawn tool

dozes no lowers itself down
the oldest man
he don’t so much sit as fall

for the oldest lawn chair
what strength he has
is in his arms

fishing for crappies
with tent poles cadged by
nutso wind chair

wet dream of a ruined
badminton birdie chair
was in guinea he was there

against the japanese
snipers in the trees
kicking up dust

his buddy beside then
behind then drunk on bull-
ets unwinds like electric

in pop last asleep he’s on his own
belly it’s a blade only time
lifts up a little like the lizards do

takens a bullet in the face his one
and only eye lost and that’s just
the beginning at that time

every nurse young thin beautiful
came on back home
he was at war saw action

but one day today being 30 may
memorial day ’16 he’s 95 and 93 days he can
still salute then they pop off the rifles

there’s a mural downtown
they just finished that
he likes that he looks like himself salute

pop off there is truly a motion for everything
something called milking muscle memory
wide i watch the sun bind the wind

and chat with aspens a candy spray
watch moth and butterfly
play fake fall leaf on vetch and mallow

on buttercup on columbine
sheep babies bow true
their tails in circles spurting

i think to amuse the ewes
cough up more body patience
every being bending now

towards hunger
or plunder or caulk
or creek or creak o lovely love

loyal is as loyal does
eats the eyes off reason
the blood in me the blood in you

the bamboo the aspen and
what you get by on i get by on
the doling and the doffing

of witting wetness when money
was liquid metal think low wing
’fore minting think rayness

thick reach brightest nearness
luscious amnesiac
slush soft blues

boil that knucklebone
til it gives what it can
sueted stanchion broken to tithe

must’ve buttered the chain
to slip the chain
one bird chain

and freedom both
bother and the unction
miniature mirror

at finger’s tip
enacts the wound
and curtains it

crucified by light dappled fractious
by god pump that well
ah milk jags

a lag ol leg
into shit talkin stockins sheer
while vine insanity below

while wild tattoo
while truckbed trashed lovingly
while gut bucket guitar golden

giraffe bone banjo
fattens the dancers’ compressions
while such older treers speechify

of the burdens of leaves
and of leaves’ sweet release
o let us sway be

sworn to please
magician’s silk half off
til thursday autumn

crooked creek foam
dirty underwear adorn
baptized by bounce atone

to whites that blind
twobit colic sugar strewn
by cheapo shrews

all in and through
spare woods the size
of a dust stretched

hollow leg thin
epistle to stand in
ha lumberjack’s whistle

more like it
while all around
wild dogs’ fan saw mouths

spread wide
red ride trick time
unto not it

THEY PAINT

themselves
with mud
and the afterlives

of certain pondy ass plants and
they accomplice ’at
with a whole lot of throwing

stoop and pitch
stoop and pitch it
stoop pitch

but what you can’t see
can feel it falling
but there again

you threw
it so you
are it

just as the pirate eyepatches
tarantula-ing yr lapel
are who you’ve sometimes been

just as the weather
was the one
weathered the weather

hi-5 blind
cool killing it
oh so casual in the win

carrion confetti
of coleridge chris
whitley christopher smart

rain trellis luck marks
mud orthodontics
mist posthumous mist

under these and they i glaze
and praise run and runnel
stoop to stipple in

the art of camouflage
kind transference or travel
or plagiarism or side lined

with snowflake catpaw
with newspaper ember
with moth blow

yr nose
with a hamburger
napkin

kid killed it
so wipe it
fresh from the heart

all
upon
him

and what did he learn
from the body undone
that dead wet

the life in it heady
heat weak wane unready
the echo pre shout

the gravy to cradle
settled up with past flung
lunged under thud tender

a blocky punctuation
a den a dean
everywhere on the body

nowhere in open air
nobody i recall my self boy
uneven shit yard

that’s them dogs for you
that’s throwing a ball up
for catching it

that’s trickier than
you might think
that’s something to do

with the tragic joke
slant and slope
of self and earth

of acned acre boy
in the ditch
kickin mt dew

bottles pregnant
with piss
pumps his arm

wild like mad
that the trucker might
milk plunger his horn

flight a flat
rock of sound
clap those erasers

whited with ash
from human bone burned
clap and the harnessed ghosts

and the cliff divers
and the meth freaked freds all
to a one fingertips touch fall

that’s self same thing about dog
thinks it’s all about them
my god good errant toss

my bad dog good pirate prince
my shitty spit slobbered ball
my 29 tosses til dryish again

my not my ceiling opens
my not my sky uncorks
my not my season tumbles

as carpish suckers
roiling in shallows
but how can i track you

if you ain’t working
on something hard
about to hollow all the gavels

into pipes
the greyblue ratbird
you exhale iridescences may well

bee your own scales returning
to a visionless distant unmoney down
unheld greenbrowed

water reopening and
they’re there as it does
skirting us lonesome hihat weavers

and ringing silence
lawless and binding
ringing it with a double u

all lamppost future pure
and woven of such wrack
as this as they

covered up in it
hunker nestward
their blood the hunter’s

supple
clay slow
blood

their ladder
snorts the checkered adder
bade the chokecherry aubade not me

their body the pliant cattail
the bossy bleed note redwing
sterling stopped atop bows

at the pace
of watchfulness
for the prices of love

for we taste of one
another disallow swallow
the oldest urge to hum

offkey amazing
graces again against
creases stoics stampedes doors