peu probable that Sam

he's flagged and tagged with all his curls, or that he knows
   & tells he'd peed in some cop's grinds!--

and acts as a  poor shemp to a diminishing crowd, ol' Sam
  who's mad and dead and short,

who's gone gone before his voice's ready to crackle in court
  because he's mad, & sent to hell

with a wife who looks good in hose

Theologia crucis

(for Fleming Rutledge)

Cross, roughly pointed in shape with just the right am't of
  the new thing,
             often enshrined in woods & traps--

             just bits of a universe's first blow

stated as this thing and tramped til its beam bows in the sun
            to keep it new

A name (such as that of President-Elect)

As the eyes open, and even as the full nation
   wakens at last to

 the President-Elect!

still a barking teacher or frail spider in air
  can refer to him--

for a name's something, possibly him, isn't it?
  The name

is like the whipping-tail of real strong tides
  on which to rise

(or not) that says he dies but will not today.
  To associate

a garish, thrusting chin with a famous face
  largely drawn

by families, and their enemies and kin
  & then some thrones,

is all that there is. A name can be any tree, too,
  or its fruit, or the

spongy white-belly of bark & underside--
  it's not just optics

So it's him and he won't (as some think) pollute
  anything with just a

resemblance to him or to any lion's ginger mane
  or the soft-pawed bear,

     will he?

Ghost wife

  How does it feel to lose her?

To be lost in the heart  of a dead cat that lies sadly by the road
  is not quite how it felt

but is still near enough to take the sole form of a fetal bloodless
  ghost of any cat carcass

that'd once petted me, paw outstretched to me for years without
   a thought, a cool ingratitude

It's how it looks to the aggrieved eye (and not just heart!). And
  ghostly pairs in me, insidiously

accumulated these past several years and horribly transmitted
   like one more sodden death

are always to be found where our accustomed jays and yards
  of a joy have been ground and

have vanished like a matted spirit by the road (minus the death
  pitch and sun's knife edge, of course)

My lost wife cannot then just be the usual red clay either, similarly
  felt absence of her garden

-swarming and eruption of flies drawn to succulent warm of it!-
   but always always dearer

Advice forTeuta the Queen

You can frogmarch young romans tied to a chick mad for all things caudal
 (as the young & stupid are), too lingual for their own good; or

fly on your lembos prow forward to lesbos, a young bitter Antoninus on
  your scent, where you'd have lain with spumy chin in the sand

(chin and spit on open sand!);  and if you'd stayed home, enough millet and
  panic galore would certainly dry up all imagination and pity in you

Don't be seduced into theft of cattle and gold and a cute naked roman celt--
   stay at a darling lake retreat, laying in  torcs, anklets and the rest,

Try rearing sires of yours to read lives instead of turning lewd, sly, laconic
   Be a best friend rather than guest-friend, and hide one breast

Qandeel

And nothing I can do about it--
  late evening sun
 

Ode to some of the Gage Park dead

Gage Park

I recently discovered that the grounds of Gage Park sadly conceal hundreds of unmarked graves that still remain, to this day (after only the tombs had been cleared to make room for the prosperous Victorian Gage family). The dead here have really no choice but to speak to the people above, and if they do it will have to be from the feet up. There's no other way of knowing that they're there. And if communication were recorded in the form of a poem, a poem's rhyme and rhythm must reflect that eerie footfall.

I should like to imagine that they will whisper to me, too. Perhaps just one of them, the youngest and most vulnerable, still clutching somebody's swollen hand. I'll take a guide with me, some local historian with map, just to be safe. I believe we bear the dead (even the pre-Confederation dead!) best singly and in cooperation. It's perhaps how we all will die...

____________________

Perhaps below me here was the veiny hand that'd sadly stiffened like
 a sodden turnip farmer's thumb,

quite likely a choleraic child's last hold on life; and a shape of unaired
  flounces of she who's lain near him,

or soiled hips, i.e. of an overwrought mam, who did not die of drink-
  it's these stirring below me in the Park

(and not so much either as a carved letter tooled skilfully to look like
   angel lips or something very uncial)

I think I'll wade among more than one of the many hundreds blurred &
  stinking like the sodden, even in grief

(for what Hamiltonian in pre-Confederation woods wouldn't have been)
  Of those sinking below below below are:

the shrill blowsy dress and dad who had also been lain rather pat, and,
  a child dead, mud-shaped (not just a shape)
_________