Self Portrait Holding the Camera at Arm's Length

These love-hungry hours of the new century
wait like something silent and bleeding on the kitchen table.
We sip wine from jelly jars and listen to the smack of the night
beetle on the kitchen window.
I eat the I Ching and you, my lover, sing
songs my mother never taught me.

I wrote the forty-one verses of the universe on an acorn.
I have the manifest humility of the peacock.
I am the cat that trods to all the measures of the music,
the russian blue who left the mouse's head
at the foot of your mother's bedstead.
I the thieving squirrel of beech tree birdseed.
I the purple rook who steals
only the best handmade shoes.
I am the fallen timber of forlorn doves, the smitten fly,
the undone virgin’s slipper, the half eaten book.
I am the ugly stepson of tomorrow, bastard
lice of Frank Stanford,
mud brother of every dead Marine.

As a boy I rode school buses down washboard gravel roads,
copping a nod and popping a rod every morning.
I kissed a sliver sandwich and thought of sex
every seven seconds.
You say I was a tender leaf of April
bruised by God’s thumbnail,
seduced by salvation
and an eighth grade student-teacher,
Ms. Tongue-of-Fire, she whose kiss could lick
thirteen coats of paint
from the bulkhead of a battleship.

I the moaning capillaries of Montagues and Capulets.
I waged war on tent worms and tree frogs and saw the last
drop and final word of rain.
François Villon would not claim me, he wouldn’t
pay a measly fifteen bucks a month
for child support. When I was a boy,
my only friends were Beetle Bailey,
Barney Beagle, and Beowulf.

When you speak of life and love, remember
the ruined chimneys, brick pillars
choked with snakebit kudzu. Remember
the tumbled mansions of the coast,
the shotgun shacks gone to sea,
Katrina portraits weather-worn and wormwood.

My dear, you lie awake at night
and think of life and love and hear
my dream ponies kick and crib
their pole-barn stalls. You see smoke
dribble from the nostrils of marble statues.
You know their cold eyes
follow the slightest dust mote
lighting on the sheets
and your soft wrist.

You know me.