I. Between afternoon light slivered in green, the meretricious glow of BP neon,
the lingering V-2 test; the boxy hospital lights, the clinic
for syphilitic Guatemalans, for garlic pickers and the one-armed, the no-armed,
the many-armed, like baby Ganesh; the oleaginous cast
to John Foster’s eyes, the under-ripe bananas, the Persian stripe,
to Mossadegh and Kermit, to the laughing felted frog
II. Two trees split and spear—scarred, inverted anchors; antlers,
burnt black and salted—cut a pair of gothic question marks
against the Midwestern bleats; a sleuth of bears, a shiver of sharks,
the oceanic thrum of some land-locked tourist cote:
“Diet Rite,” “Yuma,” or “Maybe I,” or, just, “Hell now, Sheila”
III. Beyond hell, beyond fraying clotheslines and loose-leafed copse; beyond
dotted lines, the pink and white Rand McNally polygons of proving grounds
and the Tohajiilee; beyond non-historic grasslands, suckling in blood
and the gynecoid swell of bodies baked in the earth
IV. To buffalo, waking in the dark, queer
as leaving a theater and not understanding
how it became, at last, night