Thank you in gold particle. Thank you in wave. Thank you any zygote worth its salt. Bend down to be capacitated. Bend down to take your crown. Thank you parting membrane. Thank you for the crown that wants to be a noose. Thank you—slip down, cervical vertebrae. Thank you, fontanel. You have turned this brain into a fosse. Thank you scouts spreading out across the grain. Your doggy snouts now pick up the scent of blood. Thank you thought, that salty tinsel ribboning the hundred dollar bill. Thank you, rib bone. The brain mints double currency, twin waves at twin across a river, you my brother and you, my veiny border. For you I roll my syndrome down to zero. I stop the clock; a stopped clock’s a double crown and it says zero zero, while the crowd shouts from the bleachers, bleached of stain, shouts shalts and shalt nots while the ball crests, sinks down to fill the basket like a crown, upside down. Water and salt fill the isolation tank where this moment is suspended, you and your brain rock there, sapless as a brain -dead babe. Sadcoat, trenchcoat, dressed for war, a drain to drain the wound and a drain fitted to the heart, crowded with gold husks, principles, fixtures, faults, bacteria, you golden hand that melts the bone, shout at the bullet smelter, two lungs hung-up in the steeple, salt lantern blown out corrosive, smearing the sea with blond down. Down comes the beam, it decays and sheds, it lays a lacquer down under the golden dome, the brain in its jacket shines and shines and lies down in the salt marsh down in the kennel with the hunting dogs, crowded with breath, and accommodates a gold bullet in both hemispheres, the bullet shouts thought’s steeple down. You lie down like a river as thought spills out on straw. You are the liquor that steams down the seam of the jeans. You the suture stemmed with gold, stout rivets, miner’s hammer, you the hammer to the brain, you the footfall of the scouts, shouts in the thicket, you the crowd that waves its tickets, blond train smeared with light, trail of salt which marks the battledress like a wingbeat drawn on serge. You the surge, the shout. You the battledead, the widow’s salt, the bullet in the crown. You the salted aquifer. The pulseless fontanel.
This poem is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
