He, Had He Not Abandoned

there was a flow here, detectable, once
a sense of an immaculate, what?

was Susanne the name of a service?
on a table in the parlor a snow drift

the laurels for penetration equal
to the equine laurels for a single leap

he, had he not abandoned the word,
still would, agglomerate the spaces

the prism around a delicate face, etched
in chalcedony, dead, through which

a series of gently curving moons
beams of the home she might have been

the body the property of the body dynasty
given limited power to rule in its own stead

in the pool the top of a hippo is barely visible
on it sleeps an ocelot and her litter

it has become impossible to govern this household
throngs of the pierced, the scarified gather nightly

their dance incorporates decorating each other
with the green blood of marsh creatures, inked

into the skin with teeth, tethered to the ends
of the canes of captive, shaved aldermen

before these situations generate widespread
storms, better bring down the satellites, pack

your carbon suitcase, the telekinesis
of lions to withhold information

by giving it flight above clouds
making dolorous sounds grow avian

for this art you will be believed
a psychopathic ring worker

clapped in county and made to be
an atrocity stenographer, brown dials

with which to record the autopsy
and the gradual degradation, its drain rate

then the thrown free montage
Pakistan on a single, living stanchion

the girls blinded and placed in a state
of freehold, affirming their ramp status

ala the albatross in the rime
a consensual phone, conduit hooking times

in crystals of pure milk, moon bright
that would account for the bouffant collar

and astounded hood, the clitoridean apogee
there was a princess, they say, who walked

the halls of the Waldorf, the secret one, saying
her own missa annualis, compelled by the signs

imprinted on her lips, thighs, labia
from the chantry to the ship’s galley and back

a wedding forestalled to attend to the bird
we know now it was cholera, but a guest

is a guest and requires cultivation, a meal
and to be put up, to be kept in thrall

there are chords in your skin, your data
the music of the stilled crew, a black sea bird

her glass lips at your breast, to sate a system
face of rivers within a reflective union, the chin

precision, suspension, then the chill, a tensing
of the cool veins, viewed by one only on release

a blue tree made indistinct, but more precise
for its lubricant, the eye chipped, a depth perceived

exchanged for trinkets, laid in ascending, supplicant waves
on the string of the maidenhood marionette

pupil that winks through both planes, through
the downturned palm of the black carpet