From Broken Prisms (January 30, 2005)

The flavor of the month
comes in concrete chunks and pyrites.
with an aftertaste of bonding adhesive.
The bitterness assures the palate of its strength..
It comes in colors, feldspar, cherry, citronella.
But it’s also brown as rust, the water in a well
whose surface only you can see. Its murkiness
belies medicinal properties. The nausea
is a purgation, even as it shreds your guts
into metal coils a machine ejects
to bind, or blow apart, or to communicate.
Tear stains and fallout filtered through concrete,
years of weather, their turbulence apparent
in tiny steel-backed mirrors embedded in the chunks
of concrete thudding to the floor. A taste
of jet exhaust, slightly bitter albeit bright bouquet,
a white rainstorm in a tunnel, a vortex
of jet exhaust funneled into a plastic wineglass.
Can I dip a cracker into this?
Drink it from a slipper? Water my flowers
until their colors mutate to blood-reds
no Ralph Lauren nor architect has visualized?
The lining of paint can also eat my stomach.
The lining that girds my stomach cannot kill me,
can only make me stronger.
It drips down closet walls, gets into things,
seeps into carpet and drywall sturdy
as the baths of Caracalla, its basilicas
arching over bathers, generals and gigolos
whipping their backs in abandon with poplar switches
as the rain cracks an arch to tell them
nothing is so solid that it cannot bend
or break outright, yet hang together afterward.
Stick your tongue out for the sacrament.
It’s bitter, so mixed up you can’t tell
one source from another, but it’s earth and sky
so surely it should be innocent and common
as trees in the yard with songbirds in them,
snow flecked with bird-lime and nuclear fallout
iron-enriched once-coursing streams overstocked
with fish, the undulations of their fins entrapped
in this concrete roof alleged to be enforced
with tempered steel. You can depend on this
they claim, landlord and roofer extraordinaire.
How many inhabitants in this industrial corridor

owe their heads to him, their lack of hats,
their empty hat-racks, their indifference
toward weather-stations, umbrellas, carports?
Parasols remain in glassed-in exhibition cases.
What clouds? They ask, never having tasted
a roof seeping down closet walls into buckets.
Not inspiration, but perspiration,
a symphony or poem sweated from the pores
until the magnum opus pours from open orifices,
dripping cool impurities in blithe ignorance of the hours,
or cracks the surfaces to which we were accustomed.
We thought we’d lean against the same wall all our lives.
It was an idea they allowed to fall through the cracks,
which are tiny, then wide enough to let the old construction fall,
the safety and solidity it promised, a dwelling
with window that properly opened and closed, a view of heights
to which the dwellers were immune. Now all floats in a vortex,
rubber toys and memoranda, urgent once but ignored mostly,
and how many family effects swirl inside the new holes in the earth:
they open and close, and no one really knows why. So when
the roofer comes to tell you nothing’s solid, perhaps he knows
from whence he comes, from floods alone. Which hole
in the sky will open? Can we forecast our fall?