Going to visit my mother is like starting in on a piece by
                                                                                                       Beckett.
   You know that sense of sinking through crust,

Your glassy wind breaks on a shoutless shore and stirs around
                                                                                                             the rose.

I was born in the circus. I play the flat man.
   My voice is flat, my walk is flat, my ironies
         move flatly out to sock you in the eye.

All day I measure noses.
People are brought before me.
My brass calipers never lie.

My father? He was into shoes.
But also into pins and needles,
pots and pans: a five-and-ten,

Each has a foot-square paper napkin stuck
to the headrest: a bow to budget travelers' sensibilities.
Too bad each square evokes a paper toilet seat:

It's not as simple as rhyming “mud” and “blood”
   as Owen did and does (“I, too, saw God through mud”)
   in his “Apologia.”

There will be spiders the size of your ears, drinks
that will make you stupid, matches you'll long
to strike; there will be mop-ups the size of Rhode Island.

Much
of life is Dutch
one-digit operations