Nothing But Glass, Snow

Rosecoloured the tamarack country lethal concentration zone
 
Someone in the house with
 
They’ve sealed the window   locked the door
I am told she is in the ward, asleep     prepared for a syringe.
 
           cordwood    throbbed and snapped
            people labouring, pacts with dogs    cautious of human 
                                                                                              touch.
 
Among 4-L water jugs    blacked-out cig shacks
motel strips    truck stops or Super A’s salted mortuary     I swirl 
like a question mark   like snow   suspended.
 
Tired, she said, of picking up
 
my mother had trouble
getting up
 
was late getting up. Was it that
morning
 
the dog submitted to the
petting, I spat    rubbed it in the fur above her ears.
 
*
 
No mistaking    jasmine    illness. Worried the two would conjoin
I close  the tall window    rowed eyelets 
plugged into precincts often hardly look like trees at all.
 
Scattered bottles of beer
                                        you    keyed-out  mother    , lying low
 
           My dog is trapped in the ceiling
               click of her paws
                frantic snuffling
 
ash or snow so lightly piled on
 
Like you, I prosper every two to four ounces
of sickening property
Thunderheads, Title, Romance, Etc, Women, Interpersonal, 
                                                                                   Paranoia
 
gumminess,    grease around your face  the scuts    ransom,
onion-skin velocity,
fibrillation shame and charisma
 
Shorted, burned up,
to at last come forth from the bare floor.
 
The wet end of the Christmas tree
bagged
and steered, like a 
bandaged wound.              Needles  woozily god damn 
                                                                       What do you know 
 
*
 
Mother, we were arabesque peaches, don’t forget that.
Dirt on your        cheek                height        reach
            dianthus 
and the river frozen      tinier than handedness of a crystal
 
*
 
at night a drug’s time-bent  star-like 
emission  pill or razor   
small quantity  cold glittering
feet legs abstracting   I breathe 
nitrous oxide from balloons    unsparing, as bombardment tilts 
 
*
 
the bottle is knocked over     
frangible twigs  crowns         respotted to their starting position.
 
I saw this man      in vestment widened out like a bell
an adjudicator a magistrate, with rings, through fibrils, 
                                                                    through gills,
he took my statement.      I miss this boy, who is now so ugly.
                                                                                              Simple
            statements, he corrected.
I am, I said. I want. Growths on his hat       crusted veils of ice.
I want to get back. A dark-spored poor quality thing.  Let me want
                                                                                             to.
                                                                        No, he insisted.
I touched his hat and it did stick, to test us both.    His
cigar-brown robes
weirder dusts he incubates empowder me.      Brittle, like chalk.     
In turns I hang or decorate      anti-inflammisorries     
pushing up through duff
 
          flash of kohl around the eyes
fluttering time and again across the hot lights as a body
                                                                                   spins
 
Thinking weird special, like being seen doing.      Mother
                                                                                 disapreparing 
           spancelled       Dogs over a carcass
                        The tricky part for the
                                                            decomposed straw piles pushing up
 
innumerable  warty caps expand.
You smell like a paper cut
says the dung-loving  ambassador  who bites an onion like an
                                                                                              apple.
 
I lost her at the turn of the millennium.
Tell her, please, her child’s child
is
 
*
 
There it is    blackening
amphitheatre    anvil cloud    trailing my forty-two years.
 
Many labour    on their tortured ankles
for an answer
in the watery shuttered maternity ward.
 
Fishes mouth the height for flakes
tendril bodies tremble Are you… 
 
Greenhouse  artificial fog    heat from rotting vegetation
 
           I want, I worked to say, small bearer
            blooming in the pool.
 
Aroma. Necessary. Necessarily.   Facile. Face. Facility.
Faucet. Etc. Dog
barking in distress. A woman yelling.
 
Sometimes the lamp in the cloakroom
is the only light on