Bard in the Square (old, 02)

1.
At your back the bard feels the vibration of traffic
unloosen its granite base and the plaque
on which his bronze self rests, his back turned,
stone-deaf, possibly humming Evangeline.

2.
You were eviscerated, eucalyptus and saffron
stuffed into the cavity of your chest.
You spent your day looking amazed,
your new sight agate or turquoise.
A broadcloth folded above your loins perfectly.

3.
How could your brass feet intercept flights
of bobcats to the darker pockets of the woods?
You sensed how bogs in April buoyed the freshest shoots.

4.
The book on your lap, your hands relaxed
upon the lion’s-heads of the armrests
of throne or plush Victorian easy chair
in which are burned effigies, its backseat padded
with cracked leather, stuffed with straw from savannahs
in which shallow freshets the river-horses munch.

5.
Your poems were weighty copper ingots
in a sailing vessel headed from Cyprus,
until the ship sank in deep waters, no survivors known.
In the effort to retrieve you steel nets snap,

sharks circle the rescue team, which abandons
the project to nature’s whims. But your poems
are not nature. What has grown around them
is vivid, green, and ambergris.

6.
Words for the placidity of swamps,
not experienced but daydreamed,
are less important than how the book has closed,
as if its many pages were so overtaken by mildew
you couldn’t make out letters -- useless the indices.

The book is the Apalachafaya bog.
The pages are glued to the chair,
the arms of which only look like lion’s-heads,
not stags who have disguised themselves,
leaping from the red gule or the bend sinister.

7.
Streaks of copper oxide deform the flesh-tints
that can only be imagined at nightfall.

8.
The words you deploy so weighty
they nearly throw you off the stool,
polysyllables or blunter, Anglo-Saxon monos
you picked up for a song at the flower-shop.
They didn’t want them anymore.

Now you hurl them at the crowd
like so many battle-axes, so many slippers of glass
rescued from cow-ponds.