At the note of an owl’s hoot, a field mouse is made into a packet
for its suffering. & here I set to nonsense, boiling a house worth
of barley, knowing a kidney’s grip. The trouble, honesty &
prepositions; when a fox’s kin is suddenly lifted from its grief, what
separates me & a raptor’s kindness? On suggestion, the woods snap
to a cricket factory. Kindness: nature stops with what’s larger than
its belly. See the oak at the end of the walk? O, it will turn
into a sculpture at dawn; there’s a thought: sleep in a knotty hollow
harder than a skull.
I arrive home to dusty junk, busted pottery, the sound of keys—any
of these nouns, stuff of atonal melody. Testing the notes, I tumble on
a bundle of sticks. Accidents will kill me. An example: waking isn’t
an intentional thing. And if your skeleton refused? The world is
worse for wonder, & I owe myself more sleep; to tend or weed a
dewy rock garden, to lie twisted in some sheets.
Douglas Luman is a student in the MFA program at George Mason University in Virginia where he teaches odd classes about chance and coincidence in contemporary literature. He is also the Book Reviews Editor for the Found Poetry Review.