As if a blueprint of author’s imagined
garden could begin without the 28 leathern paws
of 7 unassigned dogs halting, holding
their howls at the edge. If you draw me a map
I won’t find you. This poem is for the cartographer
offering an alternate arcadia, I mean, a third
arcana. I mean I believe in spoil, wineskins accelerating
unlit wars, ending ends. As if this poem
isn’t populated with obese angels and outsized
stars, muzzled strong-men. But this poem is also
for black smart phone screens not networked
or worked and inelegant without intelligence,
molly-mirror unreflective of the un-shiny other’s
intent, only an idea in abstraction upon lack
of electrification. This poem is clearly for myself
alone. My mother may have wrapped me in
a cloud. Because of this arrangement, I have
insisted on some theories regarding Ash and Hair.
Instead, I ask myself if I mean Vapor and Ocean,
Air. I got good at this somewhere and now I need
to get de-skilled; I am now only a spouse
to my true nature, a digger of foundation, fence
posts. True. I have stayed here long enough to
achieve, and now my arms are the arms of evident
strength. I really want to be the one in the kitchen,
inhaling mint, wetted basil: artifacts of exposed
hearth. Upon first encounter,
sugar was qualified as honey without bees. This seems to
suggest that strength—for a Cashiered Soldier or Bad
Poet—is only intention without integrity. Howls
echo in the uncharted empty even if the animals are
not near; the nature of the canyon is to act and act again;
reverberation. I mean to admit I remain
in the self-styled wild

not out of an attitude of endurance
but in avoidance of the ultra
charted zone, the solid city
structured and clay-hardened.
Upon identification of the subject,
I collapse. Just as I cannot kiss the counter,
I cannot, cannot caress the fur of the domestic dog,
I cannot even accept
the rope
that made the animal so,
can only
insist a cloud
cannot be contained
or rent

Image by Brian Butko.