The following poem was one of five finalists in the 2010 Sonora Review Poetry Contest, judged by Caroline Bergvall. It appeared in issue #57 (spring 2010) of Sonora Review, along with work by Jeffrey McDaniel, Nik de Dominic, Catherine Theis, Joshua Robbins, Peter Jay Shippy, and Matt Stangel.
Black Wool As the Answer to Everything,
the Antidote For, the Synonym Of,
In Medias Res, Black Wool is Love—
I black wool, so
what to tell others to explain my brain bleeding
mournful brain stuff,
blue feeling/thought
turned black, blue-black
blood the heart and head
send forth
like a waterfall
poured over the shoulder
pooled at the waist?
There’s an itch across my back.
Black wool follicles
grow conjoined though glad pores,
blanket of wool cocooning
me as I croon: O
there’s not enough praise for wool,
black wool.
I can’t bring myself to scratch the itch.
An enormous ebony spider
has spun and is spinning
the universe.
The Milky Way’s stuck
like a bug.
Are you lounging
in your dreams
in pasture with your arms
around the shoulders
of the getting naked-er
as we get hairy-er
donor sheep?
Wrap your eight legs
around me. We’ll sleep, like the jailed,
on sheets of wool, sleeping the sleep
of black wool sheep
like dead pharaohs
or worms tunneling through
dead pharaohs.
How chosen-one
to give up
this for that, to embrace
a worm’s or pharaoh’s
caste, rejecting wine, song, knives, spoons,
trumpets, bunting, guilt—
sleeping eternal black wool sleep—
no infernos, beatitudes, treasures,
boots, alarms, or rain
to wake us up. I kiss black wool,
turn it to trousers,
flames, leaves, spin
ruby-black wool
into black wool I—
at ten below zero, a halo of wool
protects my brain
from frostbite.
I shovel an eight-inch snow
from woolen steps. It’s like shoveling
eight inches of dead skin
after an eight-day angel orgy.
To become woolen
is to emerge from underground
caked in earth.
Hatched from wool
is a bird who hears things
at the decibel level of melting snow. It flies,
feathers flat, beak tearing into
what’s next
as fast as it can
like a bullet
its body an egg
to hatch from.
A black and woolen rope
drops from what you might call
up there.
I reach for it. A dog that wants it as much as me
growls at black wool I,
a gray and yellow-haired dog
raised on scraps of wool
dragging its shadow
and in the shadow, which is seething
the steam engine,
the wheel,
the formula for maintaining orbit.
This shaggy-haired and stray olive dog
carries the repentant morning sun
on its mutt-gray back.
Hold velvety black prismatic hologram wool
to the light
and turn it, redirect
the light to the street
where traffic stops
for what has the feel
of an accident:
a black woolen wrecker
police cars
and flashing emergency lights. Waiting for word,
everyone’s tapping woolen feet.
A black blues ditty
is played at the speed of
barbed-wire
blood-black
wool.
The dead make a stew
with steel, glass, plastic
as the broth
in the bowl of the night
and with my hologram fingers
I eat it
using an every-drop spoon.
Who robbed the cricket of hair?
Hey, cricket, take some of mine.
The spider has hair. There’s
the hairy fly. There’s partaking
of hairy me.
Cricket must have hairs
I can’t see with a woolen lens.
What I can see: the almost-clogged heart
in a creek-bed pebble,
trout
using their hands
spinning a black wool tunic.
They could raise a barn
if they wanted
these trout
dancing an underwater
half out of water
dance,
a black wool ballet.
It’s raining wool, black wool. Woolly cricket,
make a C note with your one leg awkward
against mine.
A globule of hail
falls past my window, collides with pavement,
makes twelve less-significant globules of hail
that dance like mad scientists
racing to invent a black wool umbrella.
Tomorrow, wet or white, at eight o’clock a.m.,
drinking black wool coffee in my kitchen,
steam and nose hair mingling,
I’ll belch black wool
out an open window
winning the race.
In the name of the X, the O,
and black, black wool—
Sad song tonight: I’m eating my own tail
like a black-wool dervish
boiling over in snow-cover’d fields,
O black lung of earth
trying to survive winter
where winter feels like
tuberculosis.
A cloud fills up.
Pavement cracked by roots
is also stained by leaves. I’m
arrested for announcing footprints
betray the weakness of snow.
I am both
the slow water beneath the frozen river
and the man rolling bread into balls
to use as bait for carp.
Fix me a drink, a stiff one.
Touch lightly the crack through which neon seeps.
Be a cat’s claw
pulling carpet in spite.
Dear echo of bells: talk with me
who am what seems like inadequate root structure
for a heavy trunk.
Despite me, the tree thrives.
Sea foam hoards the beach.
The sad needle weeps for a pulled out stitch.
It’s brave beyond brave,
the lamp not plugged into a wall.
I sold what was stamped SOUL
to the Johnny Appleseed of bridges,
our transaction taking place
in the pungent air
above the imprint of a hoof
in mud.
The pupil of steam’s
dilated.
Coins in the pockets
of the just-dead
are warm almost hot.
The leak in a forest ceiling is responsible
for the balance of hawks,
the graffiti of wind.
I bend to the gospel of apes,
cross the country on the exoskeletons of pioneer hope,
crest hill after hill.
O black woolen fingers,
pollinate!
Star light, star bright, star of black wool night:
I almost passed out in the shower.
I spat out what tasted like the bad, settled on my knees.
The distance from my lips to the showerhead
was insurmountable.
What was I thinking, thinking
I could breathe through my hands?
On a floor that feels like the ocean
floor I have what feels like a blow hole.
I crouch and kick
from three, from
seven miles deep,
burst through knitted waves
over sailing boats
trailing sea goo,
smudged with woolen residue,
cell under a microscope
with a bunch of other cells
and we all seem
selfish.
Come with a torch, or a lit match.
Get close.
Whatcha gonna do about
the bribe in my eyes?
