Quilted
Joseph Milford
Disaster gets quite quilted around here
Our ladders and frames gridding new names
Clouds archaic, endemic of stutterers
Notes and nodes
Diodes disrobe
When we try to fathom a single grain
Of thought or sustenance
When asked what it is like to be
Human—free will is a stupid question
Chamois and silver and the sofa frill
As unto ropes of great events lit by marquis lights
But it is just a den
Or serendipity, the emperor of ground days
Was a kite-breaker, yet you loved
An engineer
Whose words spun like gilded helicopters
About your tiny ears—landing pads
For those sounds—to be voyeur
Atop it all like a good god who has freed
The marionettes
His dolphin eyes deep and finding
Truth in the psychic canyons
Between exurb and briar patch, strip-mall thicket
And boondock wamble and writhen
Secret language of flashing bulbs
And the very different paparazzi of the hardy orchid
And snake’s head iris
We make books only from trees
Once struck by lightning—this is truly recycling
And the lungfish, swordfish, angelfish
All hovering there where they should
In the place where you call upon language
For its ridiculous goodness
In the face of the absurd or canned abyss
Let the words moon, piñata, forbode, levitate
And suspend as long as you can
Let that engineer speak
Because one day words will lose wonder
even in a world where you can order deep-fried
truffles or make a weapon from a boombox antenna
you can do things now with your tongue that ancient and existent
creatures never could and can not
yet even faux-brix trick the Neo-Platonic monkeys
and their labels are nuclides read by ISBN scanners
the butterscotch birthmark on the milky way-
farer marked the place we call earth, a mole or wart on this sauntering
cosmos beast
but we really think it to be our world
we are so hilarious—bambinos crafting their mythos
martyrs interpreting a crazy-legged machine
whose tentacles make them only holy
to turnstiles and automatic tickets
I make food from the blaze of the sun just like the rest of you
So let’s river-raft party
Just float down with cases of beer towards the waterfall
There’s a random fire in my synapse forest
Smoking out all of the tourist poems
Tin-foil hats make money--
They actually sell! Protection from abduction but abduction
Already happened—we are astonished oxen
We are sucklers of the flotsam
I try to tell them that webs
Can fall through anchors—it’s quantum—most atoms
Come and go as they please—vibrating like dew
Stuck on plucked harp-strings
I pull the quilt up higher
Its disaster is under my chin now like dark swirling fodder
I am comforted by the words in the path of the flood
In the oath of the flood
You always know it’s coming—yet you still
Build your house there
Don’t you
