memories, making glorious mud

his memories are making a glorious mud</u>


i.

it is a lumberjack's wife whose veins are budding twigs,
arms feeble as every dried branch to soak a shining star.

it is her who bares such troubled wrists for oven mitts,
so ardently delivers her hoggish assembly some hulking bird
whose body cavity is crammed tight to the sphincter
with a spiced bread. instinctively, she goes for the knife.
there is some raucous applause as she serrates

its oiled, peppered and flightless skin and on
into its succulent chest meat as every spectator
dreams of flying. her blade burrows farther in
and under enough to dredge up a pinkish marrow,

where she stops, lets the carver out
to start again from the beginning...

no lumberjack lives here,
no whiskered axe-man wakes to the rooster.
a daring cedar deadened him flat as toads who nap
beneath some winter stones. his brain was stapled to earth
with a mighty red branch and there have spread rumors.
the truth? his memories are making a glorious mud.

ii.

years ago, the wife recalls, someone invented a camera,
she says, just so that pictures of him living, at snarl, his foot upon
his victim's chest, could be placed in shoe boxes,
later made to drape each hallway
as posters to the past.

peach cobbler is served behind the bird and people embrace
each other for the first time in years. they begin to consider
what the names of their children mean. someone mentions olivia,
a name not one of them would think to name anyone,
symbolizes peace. olivia, of all names, they say.

there is a whispered conversation, some low giggles,
about the casket being constructed of wood.
what else could be done?
nothing.
isn't it hilarious, though?
a casket made of wood?
for a lumberjack!

iii.

i, i cannot believe he... where is my camera?

iv.

several drinks are served. see, an esophagus
becomes a straw when people celebrate death
and i know that trees will eventually fall
on those that fell them.

it is only sensible—we drink to forget

and a man that has killed a thousand trees
is meant to be buried by one.