Sour Diesel

Ilio

I was able

To reach the bottom

Of this river

And touch you

High temple stone

Made mosaic by the mosses

And you are most beautiful

Dark Holy Mother

Across Bog Bridge

Come to your dirty mamma
I am your violetta
That you look for
In the half light
and am wet and dripping
with the canal camps
muddy

My toes grip
the red root of the
black willow
which call the honey bees
Beeswax seals my lips
and I say nothing of how you come to me
in the quiet
in the chaos

I woke up naked
cool
with only your
new moon murmurs
and fireflies to clothe me

shake me
and jingle
my buckeye and catskins
perhaps I’ll be lucky tomorrow

I’m here with a
low down sorry man
He comes around
when my pockets are full
we eat catfish and
the corn we catch it with
Drink corn whiskey or rye
He likes my one red dress
how it snags on the Formica table
And eats from granny’s pie plates
licking them clean with his tongue
There are bones stacked high on old news print
on the packed earthen floor

I am being scolded again

“You can’t even carry a conversation
but your camelback shack
is filled with verse and broken pottery
and you sing with the uncaged birds that
flock to your veranda
cussing me in your languages
how do you carry on?

You have already disappeared
and it makes some sound
crazy when they say they’ve seen
you walk pass the petrol
stand at night
why not just stay in your swamp?”

I found a clutch from that
black rat snake
I’ve been watching her
and know some who taste the air like that
I’m singing
watching her tongue
Someone is still scolding scolding
talking talking
It sounds like
wood ducks

Somewhere in all this
I hear the Bloodroot’s pitch
calling from the holler
That red dress pales
against it’s medicine in the jug
sitting in the veranda

Aime

1

Yes I know you from the
Shadows of Mekambo
And the small smell of
Palm oil rubbed into the masks

Yet my khush balm leaves you
Copper mouthed, tumult of
Sensations, Thunder Side of the Camp

2

Cleaning out the fountain
In the courtyard of that place
We had on Rue Royale

Water lilies and papyrus had
Over took it and I tore the roots apart
Lifting out the magnolia petals that
Fell in summer, dipping in the still water

Where your bone wishes had coiled
And cleaved to it’s coolness in the humidity

While every one in the Quarter slept
Behind the filigree wrought iron, like the
Dead, in the oldest of the Parishes

3

Top Hat called from Blood River
Rounding up the animals and galvanize

But there was too much vagrancy
In your promises and dreams
And you failed to be the great
Voyant, sad solider, broken
Cart

Yet,
Not everyone knew how the Great
Bamboo cut like razor blades
No on can take that from you
In this way you were somehow
Pardoned

4

Down the street with chicory
And binets, your laughter lagged
With Tucker and Brossard
When my slightest glance
Unfrocked you

O, how you longed for the
Cicada and Dutch Wax
And knew secretly why the
Blacksmiths are so special

i give you

i give you
ebb and flood
fistfuls of harvest at the junction
of seasons

lark in the tangled meadow shows
your eyes hands
a ridge gullies
our bodies are painted
we are ashborn
and are returning
back to magma
back to stars

i will rest here
and am close
dove sunset
a song there

dreaming

Votive umbilicus