Oct. 3 2010 Skins (draft)

Oct. 3 2010 Skins

A seed and suet block swings
From a lichened maple branch
The song-birds will attack
As leaves from trees drop
Raked before they kill the turf

Outright I had to plug
To repel grubs and moles
From breeching the lawn
I keep tidy, thinking suburban.

With skin smooth like whales
Moles like whales lack real ears:
unless you think skin can hear
being all tympanum, all drum
That a seamless body can listen
For both, taut skin [evolved] to ear—

[Moles who hear the lawnmower’s thunder]
And the thunder from plows
The city sends through side-streets
And whales who hear the ocean
Boom like public pools underwater,
all thrashing inner tubes and limbs.
To trolling bull or pregnant cow
The known world is vibration -- to her,
sound brings the whole sea home.



No wonder flensing whale-skin
For its blubber was thought an art,
Earning its very own verb, to flense,

Take that border town Flensburg,
Danish Flensborg, HQ of the last week
Of Admiral Karl Donitz’s Reich,
Swallowed plot of ground

Where Lord Ha-Ha, arch-traitor,
Was captured as he pissed or carried tinder—
Truculent, half-drunk in the sign-off
Of his final shortwave broadcast.
Now that same burg’s renowned
for slick lucrative Euro-porn

Violations of bodily sovereignty
brands of which a jaded European
audience listlessly yawns through,
every orifice probed in 3D,
Every hole, every skin-grid pierced

With parts cribbed from chop-shops
For nothing cheaper than a Maserati,
High-toleranced piston-rings,
Stainless gleaming shafts. Mortified
Must emerge that flensed actor,
Less oldest profession, more bio-machine.

Briefly I caught Flensburg’s outskirts
As the sun poured above the North Sea,
Near Beowulf’s swamps, war by pikes
In those evening bogs slick as amber
Or skin that shudders from the sea- wind,

To be thrashed by Roman broadswords
And join their scapegoated ancestors
Allowed their crowns and bracelets,
Their hammered gold handiwork
That one blow to the skull sank,

And it’s taken all this time,
All this digging trenches
To unearth them, all their skin
Smooth as the amber saddle-bags
Of the scalped pioneer mailmen.

[until when they were (at last) unearthed].
[Their skin smooth as saddle-bags
After their unearthing.]
A single blow to the skull could sink.


I had to plug the turf
To repel grubs and moles
From breeching the lawn

Punching stars through the lawn