Mashed Earth

Nice how the sleep-inducing hum in the cracking walls
transforms soloists into service persons,
camouflaged as privet hutches in the gulch.
Outside the park part is: air.
Keeps ballooning in through old slit.
Signal for sod, more sod,
faceless sod, squashed,
long long while,
eroded rows.

 

Not for a long long while
need the book-keeper at his desk in the clouds
stop gazing at the jigsaw fragments below.
Wondrous juxtapositions!
Quadruped nuzzles playground object.
All the while, seesaw,
dotted arches, heehaw,
grow bigger, bigger, biggest.
Dots pop.
Baby bumps start fooling around,
extremities say howdy,
arf and arf partner linkage thickens,
pretty lines lunge and play aerial possum,
forming pruned shapes:
          flapjack privates, ski slope privates.
          rosebud privates, oyster privates,
          rubbing against each other in the spring turmoil
          before sitting down to home cooking,
          in the garden,
          newspaper spread out under the spread.

Batman warbles:
A little moonlight’ll put sunshine in your life
to blonde tresses sucked upward
by fall through sky
off cliff.

Swoop and save,
same the world over.

Climbed out.
Nuzzled lap.
Cool timing, passing through Final Arch
that’s never the final arch
to find myself
(stop motion)
sniffing freshly each AM
same old sunny green place.

Poems by Kenward Elmslie are used by permission of The Estate of Kenward Elmslie.