Moving Day

Georgetown Review

Warmly relocating is a knack, attached

and knotted firmly like a halter.  Likely

it’s passed through at birth: umbilical

cord cloven and the upright spine is either

weather-beaten or it holds.  A thoroughbred

might fare the cleanest, abandoning a studied

grammar for handwriting on the wall, however

scrawled or jolting.  I have never been a sieve

but lately I’m a glory hole that widens like

a suffocating pond.  My neighbors crinkle,

take new forms: recycled wrapping paper,

menacing carpenter ants, their threats

recited on the local news, the slow drain of

the sink.  The sea, bounding, defiant, is at last a

a cash crop and I sneak beneath the metal

cookery, a banjo’s case, the toll maker.  This

lulling isn’t salt of life, it is case-hardened

and I’m seasoned to the laying of false

scents.  We have nothing without piecemeal;

I own up alongside you.  Again a watermelon

figures in the pain of drawing sections,

lacerated fruit-veins.  Centering is only one

quarter of the hurdle.  The bulging rind,

the blood count, caving humor fills the rest.