OLD (A Touch of the Marmoreal)(01)

To bring the chain of being back
and to quell the plant kingdom,
rebel angels soaring over fields
to fructify or ionize in haze,

so that spores and mites
wouldn't rise from basements
with the ease of migratory birds,
that their mandibles and spurs

wouldn’t be so transparent,
as glass-bits, glassine sand-fleas.

To summon the allergens,
and herd them back to Pandora's box,
and to deport them.

*******

Floating dead homunculi,
pollen who seek the proper host,
sprinkled on the candied surfaces of vehicles,
gold alluvium channeling through curb-drains,

thick and crowded as the silt of deltas
with wing-bursts and the bellow of oxen
and from the runoff, a fetid, vegetal smell --

and though I know you are without malice,
nonetheless I was much luckier with water.

******

I watch for their mirages.
My arms thrash the shoreline,
silt scooped by dairy farmers
before they sold the land to Brahmins.

That I leave before the Caterpillars
fill the hole whose side I try to find is urgent.

A hole the size of a pin-head
in airways enlarges for legions
to trespass, by means of this elixir--
microcrystalline, in aerosol, suspended
the label’s print in emergency blurred--

I think of water-agitated friends
who stand around or dare another to jump
while aqua vita soothes the airways
or think about the bronchioles replaced

by poplars crowding human figures out
with the groping histrionics of dancers.
How pitiless the thickening of the trunk,
soft conifers sucking rainwater up,
hardwood holding water life-times.

Had you time to open your eyes
the human figures would have been gilded.

Wave to the dresser mirror while there's time.