house

bee hum
they have overtaken the tree
and scrapped evergreen shavings
onto the baked comb
of earth.

the afternoon is
flat in a white heat
(poems out of anger are best sometimes)
broiled, (em)broiled,
charged with sharpness like flaked stone.

i pried the organs gently
out of a still-frozen chicken this afternoon;
ice slick film coating the skin,
soft chisel of fingernails secretly working.

i worried the pieces from the ribcage inside,
the red flesh flaked and banded like quartz.

i held the pieces in my closed fist until the pan was hot enough to throw them into.

the small heart looked
like a wax model of the thing:
tiny grey cord reaching up
aorta slight but unwavering,
waxy under the slough and slosh of floury water.

the bees didn't seem to mind the slick chicken smell that wafted around their hive tree (from inside).
even a tight white drum of a house has small leaks,
like fissures (slow) grown in rock.
air currents and stock smells find their way through,

air-balloon striates when blown too big,
white stretch-marks bloom in grey ground,
(slumped accordians wheezing).

our house is a pliant membrane of brick and wash:
in with filmed skin breath,
out in porous wet trade,
lung-dust and chalk coughed upwards from the sub-floor,
(secrets have gathered like fallen nail-clippings).

audible inhale under pinprick of stars,
fallen exhale like dusk descending on sharp hills.

house

Snowing softly outside my bedroom window, my room a tangled mass of color and sparkled glints of fabric, books. I am enjoying it today... the muddle and mess... the soft breathing of the things I have collected. I am enjoying them now, as they will be replaced soon enough, by clarity, sparcity, by open plain.

As I was reading the poem below, I found something in it-- something I cannot quite articulate, but that corresponds to me, to my life. Actually it is a shadowy recurring dream that I have sometimes, a dream of a house, the front sort of half-room entrance way (portal) of a dark Park Hill Denver house... It is soft afternoon, and that is all. It is afternoon, and the particles of air have congealed into a dusty thick cloud inside the house. It is afternnon, but it means something, it is quiet as steps on thick plush carpet, but there is a sort of waiting, a hush, that time of day that turns to something else. It is shadowy, dim and mauve grey, warm grey, house thick with upholstered quiet things, layers of rugs on top of carpets, window out to a shady green evergreen shade, cold fragrant shade. I think it is the time of afternoon when the children walk home from school. I have always recognized this place, a feeling of peace in a house, (dim mix with green nostalgia), to be inside looking out through softness, into a gathering dusk-light thick particles of air like stirred pea soup.