The  Delicate Bird-Rib Frigates Of History

There is a fruity resonance

to these slippery antlers,

barely grazing the frozen lips

of sleep’s golden dawn—

its Raisan-Bran scoops and

spidery-handed Mussolinis;

its Ronald-Reagan headed dogs

frothing in an ecstasy

of garishly stirrup-horsed saddles

that corral circular carnival-rides

of abbreviated truths,

while people glued to beach chairs

sit motionlessly behind prosthetic

nose-guards and the tinted windows

of their own impenetrably dark glasses

clapping in tide-transfixing ovations

of quiet hysteria

for the backhoe operators

who lift gifts of ancient

and unspoken provenance

from black ancestral soils

in the form of two gigantic wasps,

encased in moss-tickled ice,

staring vapidly like a pair of very serious

but long dead fossils. Eyes

from the palm-heart memory

of a burning cycad

in the arbitrary horizon

of cryptosporidium greased

stromatalite drum-heads

vibrating like Miocene hooves—

silent ungulates grazing

in a tense meadow

of pissed-upon grasses

animated by the optical flutters

of tiny animals and fruit bats

coiled into scaffoldings of

dense, boughs and trembled

leaves; the night howling

of unseen bodies tumbling

across dark voids towards

the pheromone stink of sexual

partners and soggy tendrils of food,

all without the corseting lattice of words;

a braille spectrum of artifactual

residues—profound silences,

whose judgment of our own

short-tenure

is like the presence

of an immeasurable chasm

of mute-ivory tusks

in the museum atriums

of those antique places

where we go in our minds

to remind ourselves

that we are an entirely

new form of savagery,

loosed upon miniscule seas

like a 12-second hurricane

in a tabasco sauce bottle.

Scale-model frigates construed

like the tiny digestive organs

of small shellfish, through

carefully designed openings,

into menageries of delicate

animal bone; the private

and windless gardens

whose granulated petals

and stems and pollen-soaked

anthers form Lilliputian ships

destined never to sail

but to ride a glass

bottomed ocean, instead,

into an eternity of

fabricated memories.

 

JZRothstein(final edit) 8/14/2015