The Civil War re-enactments, the grey
Military drab, flintlock and saber
Haphazardly lain on ancient duvet
And your plight as a sickly teenager
Having several feet of colon removed—
None of these factors add to pleasant wash.
Thirty long years of police service proved
Your mettle—yet the deaths this year, so harsh:
A wife, a father, two dogs, two friends passed
And I moved in to this rural homestead.
As you sleep, I tend your soiled briefs, crease
Your torn white tees. Make sure the dog is fed.
You opened the doors of this haunted house
Allowing the nurture in me to rouse.
Thirty-Five In the Night Lights
And they are off again as the greyhounds. Poor bastards.
They never stood a chance. Most of the males had tendencies
To analyze and dissect the stars that had fallen in the lots
Cutting them open and gutting them, digging out ore and bling.
Bastards with burning hands and heads aflame never a chance
As the spirits coursed in their blood like electric eels tonight
And all along the promenade the dames line up knowing all
And how it all is going to go down well before these well-heeled
Hounds start their poor pursuits. It is the most wonderful folly.
I feign nobility, trying not to get involved, knowing all along
That the nets between their legs and the storms between their locks
Will tentacle me in. Never stood a chance. Never had a choice.
You get ready to go out. A ritual of the strangest hope. Wallet-
Chain keeping time on your thigh as you give the sidewalk
Its rhythm and the streetlamps their shadows. You are as efficient
As a pocketknife. You have your repertoire. Hell, you know
Even if it works out it is not going to work out. The neon lights
Jellyfish around corners and the streets glaze with glittered
Asphalt under headlights and music and voices escape doors
Opening with loners and couples alike and the crack of the cue
Ball and clink of the glass and the biplane shot down smoldering
Into the mountainside as another one makes an ass of himself,
The poor aviator, leaping from the cockpit into the Jägermeister
As she dovetails away into the night in the laughter of friends.
The sensible ones are home at this age raising children, watching
Gardens grow, doing dishes, folding clothes. How did you
Get here? 35 years old. No children. Just poems. Teaching
Young hooligans by day and pique of pith, no hero with his
Proud crest—go write your poems. They cause less harm.
And they do keep warm, to an extent, that crater in your convent,
The place where the life impacted and you still survived it.
The sun rising. The street lamps dimming. The moon still out.
from Unparalleled Diversions
10
it’s sedimentary, my dear absinthism, my dear
critic that derivatives of opium will inspire
riots, or a few Romantics
and scurvy-ridden soldiers
to storm beaches in hopes of poppy fields
for laughter foray is promised through distillation
of needles and grains
through sieves and mills and swills
and ghosts and bleedings
of stems, of pistils, of stamens
of the pollen that gathers in your right eyelid
and you blink
and tear-up and the pollen
makes a certain flower
your eye a Venus flytrap
for all of the majesty
as you suddenly see
a flower or a bee
and you happen to be
crying in the meadow in a Wordsworthian spring
as classic and cold and warm as possible
as any ode, aubade, or preamble
we die for valences
coordinate absences
we die for subtleties beside abbeys
under a tilting sun with glasses tinted
with our sisters in mind
on tattered quilts plagued
by gnats and ants, sometimes ticks
as we die of pastels
when there should be an insane
oil-painting going on
like a rampaging
forest fire
behind the earlobe
of a deaf, color-blind genius
11
clouds shredding into sections
of images greater than the cloud-images
they were imagined as before
by a mind as shredded by itself
as fiberglass insulation thinking
about cotton (er, something)
a metaphor
inside of itself
(definition of metaphor
metamorphorized) a shark with
fully functional jaws
biting itself to get to
the shark-jaws in its belly
making a technique of it, and someone
writing about or filming it
but with a robotic shark
with a camera mounted upon it
and a robot shark is not as robotic
as the genuine cartilage article in question
being a man-made ferocity, and all
the shredding, and we
are all just dapple doppelgängers
of selves, all popping out
of ourselves, schizo weeble-wobbles
Chinese boxes full of convex mirrors
we wear our guises with tickets to surmised banquets
it’s really very spooky, a naked brunch or civil hearing
we are lost in the bamboo forest
each of us holding a bamboo shoot
upon our foreheads, sections of cane
and we are made of this same wood
one out of another never diminished
only convinced of diminishment
by process which is quite preachy, repeptitive
and didactic, but we adore it, write another sonnet
because we have forgotten how to shred ourselves
writhe another sonnet
as a cloud does
in the wake of the tempest
that it itself is absolutely
the part of
and the sonnet defines this reckoning
moment of terror, striding imaginers
a society of cloud-watchers
nightmarish
the chimes of the last rhymes
the assassin’s daggers, those words
those words emerging
from clouds and finding the bull’s-eyes within clouds
the pentameters of Nature
and never try to capture them
* * *
13
having said: The Death of Wings
with this feather stuck in my throat
I will now address the angels
with arrows of chords of songs unfinished
stuck in my throat,
unfinished, for hymns are songs awaiting
a lord to come, an ear, a bull’s-eye
to fall desperately and accurately upon
the ass of a needle as it is shot from a blowgun through
the eye of a needle that leads to a heaven
in the process of being built
but the contractors are all jealous needles
and won’t let the camels deliver the goods
from the other side of any duel
to an exact pinpoint split by a blowdart does truth fly
it’s a word splitting itself in speech
Joseph Milford is a full-time Instructor of English and Philosophy at Georgia Military College near Atlanta, Georgia. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in First Intensity, The Canary, The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, The Wisconsin Review, Shampoo, Action, Yes, and The Brooklyn Review. He is a regular cohost on Jane Crown’s blogtalk radio poetry program and also hosts his own blogtalk poetry program, The Joe Milford Poetry Hour. Joseph is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been teaching full-time for the last eight years.
