Ed Skoog

Tournaments lasted days and changed you, but today the living and dead are speaking through microphone of “I Voted” button, erogenous zone, a place in the mind’s wrestle, pause that votes and bets. Other voters return to homes, run dishwasher, read to kids, get high and craft. Still others walk the golf course turning gold with sprinkler. Returns are noted. No one hangs who had not already planned to hang. At some point I’ve thrown almost everything, and broken within, activated like a glow stick. It is a sustained throwing; an act with its stink of trash — power out — each evening, the stairs and the light switch, and a pause at the open door. Unenunciated stair-structures are closing off the switch from voice to silence. This morning, a snail bore its huge garden shell, the color of owl, into the afternoon. How to choose what to bring! I set the excess down by the door, for nobody who is there, or seems that way. Near the fire. Where the weather vane points is where I’ll carry my father, slung fleece and steady footfall into the valley of the painting above the couch, brushstrokes crazed and smoked, enveloping the riders, us, trot-dazed in a conjectured landscape paralyzed by the wind’s chisel. The clouds are a sheet the volcano staples above parking lots to hills where owners shit and talk on the last phones. As long as the sheet holds I will be darling. Or it is the mildewed sail battened down where I hide from fathers. Light rain makes rooftops new. Boughs fracture like lines an iced-over pond zags ahead of a boot and in there we get glimpses of inquiry, otherness to learn more about. Silence becomes the subject the speaker set out to be, landscape’s counterpart, and reflection my resemblance. A hand goes up to stop the process, and, when the process doesn’t stop, suppresses until the next moment approaches, and passes, the bid dizzy with regeneration. Let’s fold this balloon into animals, vehicles, a weapon, the air inside song, or last breath, or first. I’m a dog when I ape my words. Who would dent or differ? The teeth of the pig are, it whispers, red and brown and recede now that they have been mentioned. When I look close: not us. What is inexpressed? This departure hurries by and is like the lion who simultaneously guards the books and elsewhere tests the river with a paw, stone in the first and lean flesh in the other world where the sun is blessing its glide back into thornbushes and I am stone, guarding stone. There is no predator I would like to be torn in half by, from the logging road a cut like a jeweler’s work down to the shore where the sea stars disappeared leaving nukes and love metered and syllabary and also the rocks they used to cling to exposed at low tide, green clocks. At dawn a fishing boat’s uncertain past the rock offshore, chord on chord. Warped sexual knuckle in flushed purple and hundreds of shades of orange, herpetic and stone to touch, cut, they grow back, vitrified, easy to draw. Round was the dish of mints in the conference room where we signed over my mother’s liver, some mints were soft and pastel, some hard with white covering. Mint grows back in the creek. The liver grows back too, largest organ in the body. No, not skin, mother, skin is on the body — we addressed this with the host at trivia night no, not the one I go to each Sunday with friends, the constant one I sleep inside of every blink. Time’s the thing that’s not the mind or the baby, which wants a nipple. Time’s a baby in a sling, all the babies in the park on blankets, beginning, a minor electricity, water and dust a kind of suet in a hanging cage and is larger than whatever the universe turns out to be (a strawberry pip) all tough winter, which has been shown to prosper. Seen from the past the line is the present when the astronauts came back, bid us bury our gravity and grow the lines that are the story of loneliness, waste, either enough or not enough. I walk past the potted plants in the side alley, marigold, sunfollower, a good plate, give a little water, adjust the moments. Constellation of last images before sleep: a walk around the drained reservoir, arrival at the island; having a theater all to yourself and they show the movie anyway. Formless or forming interior scrumble: the fluttering of her eyelid is like what floats up the chimney. Something inside is being stepped-down to the noises from when I was here last. This time of year you can see to the bottom of the lake.