apollo

The plaid experience of a cat’s ninth life,
concluding nothing: the purple crayon box

was either a blue or red facsimile of my 
uncle’s barn past the dyke, the pond,

the field of dumb flowers, maples 
and crows pecking at the floodgates

above a yellow ditch of limestone
that keeps itself nearly parallel

to the two-headed fence of cattle wire,
which stretches out for this parable;

meanwhile, facing the plaid stain 
of myself among Hieronymus’s

foolish yolk of vox-mouthed louts 
and yodelers; feeling as bogus,

knotted brown and heavy as a stilt-legged dug-

out or dumbbell beneath the matador’s hood.

Oh how is that not sensitive? 
Oh that crooked yellow stump

again (?) I wonder who tripped over the gumball first, 
blazing through the helium warmth–among the catch

weeds and goosegrass. Like a little mustard 
seed or red engine red that couldn’t stop

toking past the pink mouth of the mound that Watt 
stepped off towards his own glassy skull of Gol-

gotha. It happens all the time, whistling for 
an attic’s length of rope; the trigger’s acquittal

of a banjo snaking through its revolving door 
of strychnine: then the kind glass of milk, ending

a cat’s ninth life; that while, towards the crowded sunset, 
you’re still thumbing your nose, on one of god’s donkeys.

 eh_thursday, March 16. y'17