Stomach-foot’s about it,
one of those glitches in the Plan
who arrives from nowhere
just as the plot’s held down
with green staples, and overnight
takes out a row
with a front-end loader’s
truculence, and speared, flicked
far into huckleberries,
subdivides and returns camouflaged
as the smallest brown seed coats,
professors of infrastructure
demonstrating the world’s ribs.
For with slug, pole bean never attains
pole, but opens its mouth
to say its first leaves and this
snake’s uncle eats those words,
exchanging them for raw silver
that sticks, non-negotiable,
to the fingers. Therefore I assent
to the skunk’s mephitic passing
in the night, and that little fox
I saw clambering over
the chicken-wire fence at 5 a.m.,
if she’ll eat them too.
I fill used TV dinner trays with
Clyde, the beer that made
Fall River famous, and understand
when the butterflies come around
to nectarize in it, having tried
that mode of transcendence myself.
will even permit the spiders
on my piano keys back in the house,
who may have some inkling of
polyphony after all, and let ants,
with their illusions about
home improvement, percolate from the walls,
but the slug I will bloat with beer
till the last raspberry
stops the year’s traffic again.
War in the Garden
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