Above the red gate, the old weather sign toggles.
It might be colored by the Roman Coin,
not any great nor'easter.
Or this may be Oregon,
a centennial ago,
and we are swimming above ground
wearing the bones
of a whale skeleton.
Biting and whiting,
that winter drill—windows stuffed and lined with oil,
the driver of that truck, the imposing way of life,
the woolen watch cap.
In 1892, Walt Whitman died at high tide.
He had never learned to swim.
In Montreal of that same year,
appeared the first of the underground tunnels.
The first commercial elevator. Something
metal, and large
to show well in Buffalo.
This year,
we hunt eggs in the dark,
under tails of watchdog comets.
May Day is not made of rocks.
We need something that will burn.
Take the rod to the switchback,
light and pare it: size and height it.
Like the flash flood in Texas, 1919.
It will drain counterclockwise,
ringing haze. That yellow January,
we had planty of corn.
We walked with fishing-poles.
Will you remember
that every year
some new records displace
the noiseless ones?
A five-mast symphony of moons. It only sounds
orange, and green,
in the sky you can no longer trust
since the war began. Morning trumpet,
your son is barbed, gaudy
remainders of a wire comb chest.
He was found in the early snow.
He was found too late,
covered with whiskers and tentacles,
beside other orange-bottomed men.
Trains are starting up and leaving off.
They are collecting the corpses. They leave
the sweetmeats, heirlooms.
On the banner, they wrote:
the machine dross is gold. Quickly, now.
The strawberry moon is turning,
her lips as straight
as a village green. Look at these vines.
This is New Hampshire, this is June. No,
this is a Ferris wheel. The illusion
drives it higher. And gravity
is the slick underside of a rock,
and on the moon, a sea is running, dry lava.
We can see the makeshift cirrus clouds,
the paraselene, the moon dog.
