tars leaked. What he thought thunder brought
footfalls of lightning. He scanned over the
plateau & nowhere found a neighbours spoor.

2. Oblation

The Island nations of the colder latitudes
breed alluvial poets, it is believed, who convene
once yearly under friendly, arched viaducts
to talk of river shingle, boulder, and water birds.

3. Detail

The yellow machinery tracks on the freeway
are as soldiers in single file stretching out into the
late afternoon, slanting sun, shadow-crimson
earth leaning forward to the compassed horizon.

4. Born

The year of my birth followed by a hyphen,
by the solace of expectation, by a small measure
of success, by a teasing out of hopelessness
and of course, by another date yet to be fixed.

5. Style

Would he have leaped from the stern of the
Orizaba, at noon on April 27, 1932 if hed known
of the unfashionable rise in sea-levels 70 years
hence; Hart Crane, a rhetorical gesture, surely?

6. Beachcomber

Pampiniform it writhes, bladder-wrack or
kelp, a heavy swell that slops about rustily in
the basalt trough, breaking through the sea rush;
& solitary goes Heaney, curling at dictions.

Transgenic Pigs

The oink is a fugue, Baconian
and philosophical. By a corncob moon
they snaffle, silvery-hulled backs
adrift & dolphin-arched in the mire. A
litter of stars in the laboratory-bright
sky. PUT SOME PORK ON YOUR FORK
intones the television commercial. O but
but these are no bristle & foam flecked
boars of Arcadian Days, brutally twisting
on some Danaan spearhaft, in a
flying rage tearing at ilex roots, or
blasting marble shards with iron-tough tusks.
These are the sleek-lined, chrome-bright
& delicate trottered. These with a call
soothing as a computer bleat, ears
alert as mobile phones, flesh pliable as
an artichoke, temperament cool as a cold
cut. These, the upwardly mobile,
porcine delicacies, models of dinner-table
decorum. Designer-label pigs, feted,
wined & dined exemplars of taste, accepted
in the most refined of social circles.
These are the well-appointed pigs replete,
with a privately funded education bred O
so exclusively for the Export Drive.

Sheet Music

Like some murky storm that presages
pain, or engine that mauls the curb, the
stereo wallows its bass notes at the
top of the head, lands soft as afterbirth.
If you place a white sheet over America
500 Indian Nations show like bloodspots,
said Jim Harrison