After you’ve become a human drum
to let high frequency thrumming
create magnetic pictures of your
brain, you examine the evidence,

They are not hard to get to know:
6 and 9 keep changing their minds,
8 cuts the most graceful figure
but sleeps for an eternity,

Here bricks are so rare they are like agates
We wonder who would carry them so far
Here I feel good because I have nothing
I am thinking about

The planets whirled across the blackboard all morning, 
Saturn with its twelve rings, Jupiter with its belts,
red Mars, green Venus, the familiar blue Earth
where we sat in that eighth-grade class learning light

Faring
and with a full tank:
                              past death regardless

One red-winged blackbird can’t begin
Without the other, hidden in the cedars.
Listen, listen, listen,
For he struts between

The room was airless and damp,
the sheets a skin of sweat.
The greasy feather pillow
curled like a postage stamp.

As we stood by the casket, Momma gasped,
through tears, “Look hard! You must remember her!”
I looked hard, tried to memorize the slight
malicious curl of her thin lips—too red—

The obverse of the sanguinary Turkey
Carpet I figured I was looking for‚
Festooned with geometric shapes in murky

Nothing melodramatic, it’s just when the sunlight
came in through the wired windows and laid itself
down on the green floor, it was nice, we liked it
there, then, playing our games. And like kids