A Several World

Superfund

If this was all the access you had
to sky, looking down through
boardwalk boards into a tributary
glinting, if this was all the time
your calling or had been all
this time, and you found it, found
yourself arrested above an opening,
if purgatory were as real as bridges,
where would your religion build,
in the soft parabola of carriage
and suds, or in the hip points
your heaviness keeps in counsel
with the planks. The mill of
spiderlight and curtainwork in one
run over the impress of
cofferdam in the other. This river
in the days left to live, in
the leftover days reclamation
balances, trains its instrument
on a prospect romantic, pushy and
plainly. The joinery of the boards
is thoughtful, or the prison wish is
a watchwork through and through:
to guess at the rare punt
of a single stick's odyssey, or
to separate from the rummage
each drifted glyph or superscript
and gloss the passages. Drawn through
the bothway of the ribs:
a breath, and then another.
No prior experience knowk wood.
Not purgatory, but overage.

Smalltown Lift

One last stop, he says. And they drive to Westside Lanes.
I grew up bowling. I don't want to bowl. It was raining.
We're not going to bowl, the circus carpet dark with gum
beneath them, and he parts the curtains on the best
photo booth in town. He feeds it the three dollars, Get
in. They somehow share the short ridged stool. In here
we have to tell one another one true thing. You first. Click.
This is the best way I could think to have my arm around you.
Click. Click. Click.