They could not shut them, elephant feet not my own, no, not
you either like a reindeer these belong to a higher order, poor
Edda before the butterfly in the mirror able only to recognize
home in its reflection, material, not moral elements, yes trout
but what about salmon? I loved you and you just slept a long
green sound out over the lake, you gave the lake a spine. Animals
have a country more complete than ours say the people at home,
that dogs are generous, cats make intuitive decisions. Still, for
the flax chaff, he didn’t know what to do with his hands, and
opted convivially for the wash. They were approaching the end
of the stick used to measure their patience as a sort of lifespan,
musing upturned in the morning dew who might be
brought to them and the thoughts each carried. It seemed
an impossible scene rendering vaguely a shovel renting the earth
flinging clods into the neighbor’s yard, insisting upon this. Then
to me, he squints because he is left-handed and leaves sour
the parade of bodies seeking refuge. Romanticism is a nice salve
to sanity, a border-comedy of laudatory miscegenations of the mind
among listenings to two lira repeated in the cave – the smell of soup
brands a people, sick beast the night was, birds loftier than man
for all his puffed-up malingering. I don’t see the need of it, down
compartment, took note feeling the space to be filled more
as an opportunity to define this tunneling than to dwell on what
was in it, though I am only borrowing these gloves, chains
to the ocean in a collective dream. Shadowed nonetheless, they
root in my old age, corrupt glory white shine of the rosy plump
darling set among the swinging sea, humans on land like dumb
buoys looking for balls in depth barred by their floating nature
tombs, poor Edda, flax chaff stuck to me in weekly sketches,
chickens chirping on the steppe so many millions with me in bed
their feathers derange my senses, and no longer tickle. Was that
wistfulness in my voice, or the fabled sigh accepting that long road
extends unchanging? A tall old lout holds in his mouth a solitary joy
so many sparrows share, who flee to the sea, flies on a sheet to stay.
If one can speak of irony in connection with ghosts and green ghostly
things, they appeared bigger because they actually were so. Now
I like being afraid. What are the words to the new green songs, oh,
the lanterns position themselves, create the water’s having corners.
Darcy Eldridge studied English at Purdue. She currently lives in New Orleans, Louisiana where she works as a photo developer.