Somewhere nearby
Mr. Dialect crouches
down a cheekbone of azoic rock,
hornblende granite,
back to the back
of the aluminum boat.
Water sloshing the sides of the boat,
oddly abrasive hollow sound
like buying real estate.
For instance
B578,
a natural harbor to the north
and three inlets to the south like swimming pools,
later named, and this is true,
Schade Island.
Have mercy, Lord, on me, sang her girlfriend
on the rocks as she immersed the notebooks
of STC into print on a screened-in porch.
He’s just offshore, casting
an eye over the untroubled water
on all those improving the common law,
where nothing goes on
occurring to him
with a kind of largesse.
*
Here in the land Romanticism neglected
the Enlightenment passed by and planted
a shrub, a flag to flap and fling
the moon’s weather, should you
wish it confirmed.
*
A neighborhood sketchy with white pine,
red pine, white pine, blueberries
small in size and glaucous.
Wrinkles in the gneiss run parallel
as if an island had its uses
at one time, its maneuvers.
An animal tone
to the granite
as it masses and hides in the water.
And trees that lean from the rock
defy photographers. Stoic raconteurs,
parked here just this aeon,
limbs widely down on
the twist investing
every vertical.
*
Where stacked skyscrapers of frozen water
carved the pink-complexioned
rock into this feminine shape, he stands
a diagnosis on his face
a smile inclined
at the fury of masters perceiving the privileges of their
kind extinct.
*
Imagine him saying if
his father’s form and meaning
merged
he’d make stones capable.
Was that likewise provocation
on his part, implying
stones were stones, alas,
the ghost
as composition
had its flaws?
You see he likes to cull
and crack assertions
from all over—No woman
no cry, and so on.
