The Bookstore

ALL DRAINS LEAD TO THE SEA

The iris in its exigency strives only
to flower. These things are of a marshy sort
and a far way from any Africa.


How did I think I could serve? This soil
is bereft, with only mocking water
below, so catacombed in chalk.


There have been people lately diving to chart
the aquifer. The support staff shadows above
ground, beacon squealing as those below veer in
and out of range, bushwhacking through
swales, through supermarkets,
knocking on residences.


Would they know, from a slow contrary course,
of the intrepid demise and follow to the output
– all drains lead to the sea – after losing one on the mic?


Here is only silt. Precambria stress testing the botany.

A personal Stonehenge

They accounted only for this day
when they built the house.
The other three sixty-four

they found themselves at odds:
every morning 1 missing shoe,
coffee spilled on the closet’s 1 tie

on the way to work.

1 threatening neighbor
3 failed pregnancies
and zero things to say
And if on any March twenty-nine,
they failed to stand in the kitchen
across a gulf of 13 years at

exactly 7:15
they would miss the shard
of hard, equatorial sun, which,
in its transit, laid bare their
remembering.
And they often did.
This is the spot, one would say
I remember why, said the other

and four eyes, half blue,
half green, welled – “well”

and set about the task

of one more supper.

FLORIDA DREAMS OF PERU

Kiln dried mummies, landscape of once were alpacas.
Now all the wool is farmed in Alva, whose town museum
opens one day a week. Also: it’s very warm here.


The llamas they use to guard the sheep. More
vicious than dogs, they say, and better insinuators
for their unwolvenness. They grind rather than
tear. The Calusa would be confounded!


Well how appropriate would it be to have camels
running around under the orange trees, humps
bumping all that Spanish fruit? Better to
leave blankets on the desertification,


those Nazca scars of ash; we have our epiphytic moss, but
really need less softening. There’s a picture of an eagle
soaring over Peru. Wingspan of my palm.


Everything concentric, windless.