Bad Night At the Super 8


Tributaries of cracks course down the wall
to the black window framing a dark world.
The crooked floor creaks in a narrow hall
pierced by doorknobs, thick with miasmal air.
Breathless, you watch a homeless spider crawl
across the floor, bewildered, determined
in her arachnidity, until all
creeping things seem like legible emblems  
of one headlong, irretrievable fall.





In August


98° not the heat but the
mildew eating Shakespeare’s spine
syringes in the surf

She’s begun a new piece
Terrarium Three
mosses, bromeliads,
grasses, tendrils in
rich damp humus
dark from the boneyard
and her tiny sculptures
colors jewels thighs
antagonists or lovers 
little man little woman

Found her sobbing 
on the sofa
“Cynthia,” I said
my arms stuck to my sides
“Mahler makes me cry too”

Each hair like a spring
her t-shirt sodden, foul as
my back, barefoot
on her Via Dolorosa
crucified for that Kleinkunst
the petty dirtcraft
she never explains

Radon in the cellar
nature’s own good
granite exuding into
boiler’s catacomb
Radon leaching and condensing
sounding like a villain
Flash Gordon would’ve punched

“No,” she said not
even looking up from
the phantom Kindertoten
in her lap, “if 
he’d died an infant
this would’ve died with
him, nobody’d know”

Vinegary rain scours the lakes
clean as a coffee pot
skeletalizes woods
O Westron Wind wilt

“1 out of 4 marriages
he’s over 10 years older;
then second marriages”
“I won’t discard you”
twice I said “won’t”

91° at 9 p.m.  God.
The machine needs freon
freon eats ozone
we’re breathing ozone
stay inside they say
if you’re young or old
used to be or want

Testubes thick with
red AIDS samples 
slick with seaweed 
and hepatitis ABC&D
slop up against inner tubes
and kiddies’ knees

“So,” I joked, “in 20
years there’ll be all
these rich fortyish widows
who’ve spent every day
stretching out; they’ll marry
teenagers.  That’s sociology.”
“And long division,” she snapped.

The glass half-fogged
“Look,” I said, “there’re
ants, live ants, ladybugs”
“Yes,” she said, “of course.”

In bed she winces
angry at some slight slight
We touch as waves wharves.

I hate the weather aloud
my job’s got cancer, I say,
“If you don’t like it
why don’t you quit?”

Monoxide drips like syrup
the dome of hot air settling
like a lethal basilica
hammered with divine forefinger

Six pesticides glaze the
Thompson’s red seedless,
oil-based and utterly insoluble

In the car I’m braised
like fatty shortribs
marriage is guerrilla war
negotiation truce infiltration
ambush.  1 out of 4.

Find her sipping grappa
looking at it done,
“See?  It’s a little world,”
she says  “Nothing escapes.”


 “In August” first appeared in The Chattahoochee Review.