T I M   E A R L E Y
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FOUR POEMS

 

 

The Uses of Ethnopoetics

We transformed it in ways that at first would have been impossible for you to imagine, but time is an artificer and a drake, and we became quite comfortable with things as they were, though the lights sometimes made it hard to sleep. We no longer cried over the hepto-slink of the little snake that lost itself in the runnels. To think: a child found it possible to love a snake as dearly as his mother is to know: any and all attempts at draining the crankcase were acts of forgiveness. We kept the riots, torpedo-shaped w/feathers and No. 2 hooks, stored in boxes in the garage. We tried to avoid direct eye contact--there was a fear of fear, and any party we had turned into a communist party. The weather was just that harsh, and the sun, not exactly a blood-filtre, but close. We had a Day of the Tongue and a Day of the Mutation of Plow & Trestle. We were hoping that you would bring the music, or at least the venom note and harp, so we could have a final say. The owls carried us away for weeks at a time. The double-breasted jacket you left behind was as unkempt as a sterecoraceous bear. When the fog wore it, each gesture became an insurrection against itself. To think: did you ever at night come with your holy-mouth, your terra-chute, and bite at our napes, and insert us into your narrow holsters? We found butterflies under our nails, but had not yet learned the words. When one of us whistled, there was this certain risible, lapsarian feeling--the red sun halted, we punched at one another's throats. I do not think we understood the proper alignments.

 

 

 

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