Kudzu Mainstaying

---

This is no sensible country

for wounded thirst

commanding pecking order

into lace knotholes

driven beyond

clamoring sunday-china trellises

buttressing nascent garden walls

where the earth underfoot paces

snaps together feigned spurs

and outruns

their cottonwood-dray avenues

where streaming

carnegie ribbons

converge

from gilded cobblestone

into khaki velvet

teeming with

cape-horn panniers

shackled fast

around disjointed ankles

unpleasant rarities

to stumble

onto glistening pearls

burrowed still with the hedge trimmings

of swan-necked reflecting pools

spilling overboard

lapped to bits by municipal collies

into shirking gulches

prairie schooners topple

doorstops tremble, relinquishing motes

evaporating oases

all bronze and

no gold

revolve on the dumb streets

a apparition

flexes sinew

between candelabras

and the ridgelines

of ten-penny nehis

cloaked by lead-tinged daggers

ten days time, your scullery drawers

will leave pitched open

through no soiled hawk

will home

behind

sunday school placemats

tin rifles crack

matchsticks splinter

lesions brood

under robber-baron shirtwaists

nightcaps are fondled, turned inside out

with articulate binds

which peel

cathartic

over the garden walls

before dragging

their eroded knuckles

into rose petal

parapets.

+

5/15/1902

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Winslow_Homer_-_The_garden_wall_(1880).jpg