The Cloth Softens

 

The cloth softens during older nights,

when I am grown tall wheat,

and pillow notions coddle me a midwinter mood.

For these nights I sit in my mind

like a stone weight, lovely, and a little dish for life.

 

I hardly wake when I take to pissed out roads,

sloughed by all the tread of my era.

Mimicking them, I resolve

into a grating ambiance, see—little belly-ups,

the lifts of airy stomachs are never subsided

in my blood.  I can sweeten my sleepless stream

like punch, but it is still full of dead fish,

pissed road.

 

In a bruise of time, there will be dropped hairs,

hung skin, these rescinded eyes,

the pretend dream of the ground will

pour out my yield, my meadow-mulch of thought,

and shove it down the shithole of the Earth.

 

For now, I am the diving helmsman of my

malfunctioning body.  I have notched it by waves:

Baby to boy, to man, to husband, to father...

what is left to come but these supple, numbing

pillows?

 

I hardly sleep.

 

Furniture for Monstrance

 

Black moss is gathering and plaid design

where the heap of my body is scoured by Asclepius,

at Johns Hopkins.

 

The professor is faintest repeat,

doctor hand yet aghast my winter skin, as he bumbles

the gurney down a hallway dialogue.

 

My toe-hung tag moons my name, age,

and beneath these crayoned facts, the statement:

Inches Away from Life.

 

I am the wriggling present stopped,

furniture for anatomization, monstrance,

askew in a clean sheet, new axis to horizons of dead,

a savage prince of the new human warren, folded.

 

I am covered in hair, my black moss, patch of stars

over interweaving, gray veins.

 

My organs are dawdling, honeysuckle,

the statement, my genius, my genius,

wheeled to the theater,

seen over his spectacles,

and lit with no skylight, but another man's royalty.

timothy daniel welch