by Jim Davis
She peeled back petals of the rose
to the core, where our world was.
Now that ephemera been shed, she sings
about a picture of you
bound in a skein of guitar strings –
more specifically, the you that sat at the campfire
on a section of stump taken from the woodshed
at Elmwood Terrace.\\
One day, the absence of familiarity
with a notion like love will fall away, drift to the grass
like petals. Soft, humming sentiment
to which I would
like to identify with
less. Though my cheek bone is swollen
like ripe purple fruit, I design
a map of the far side of this earth’s moon – the width of these
United States. Callisto, Ganymede, circle Jupiter
in an orbit that will one day collide, their tragedies
intertwined.\\
to the core, where our world was.
Now that ephemera been shed, she sings
about a picture of you
bound in a skein of guitar strings –
more specifically, the you that sat at the campfire
on a section of stump taken from the woodshed
at Elmwood Terrace.\\
One day, the absence of familiarity
with a notion like love will fall away, drift to the grass
like petals. Soft, humming sentiment
to which I would
like to identify with
less. Though my cheek bone is swollen
like ripe purple fruit, I design
a map of the far side of this earth’s moon – the width of these
United States. Callisto, Ganymede, circle Jupiter
in an orbit that will one day collide, their tragedies
intertwined.\\
Mare Imbrium
Mare Tranquillitatis
Mare Nectaris – where once was water.
And Oceanus Procellarum – the vessel
of one of my weekend poisonings
pouring itself into the pocked face of Diana: ours.\\
Diana, in the early 60s, was a fat, waxing gibbous.
Unlike the waning crescent of this and every day
between 1969 and 1972, when we walked all over her.
Now hear this, you: the practitioners of Santeria
take the head from a Burmese python with a rusted kitchen tool
in praise. Far away, we stab, we enter
that face of moon, pocked and cratered - hung over
the city of my big shoulders, to be congruent
in all our corresponding angles, in pure, Anglo-Saxon text
to be read by false light. The hunt. The violent language of
everything, once it has been, explained.\\