Wyoming (Prelude to Montana)
Maybe it's the cows, twisted by science into hideous monsters with too many limbs and bright lips that whisper uncomfortable truths or maybe it's the clouds of pink and swooping and gloss and their sickly wads or maybe it's the bird of each fence post that tries to sell you a telephone or peck out your lungs but something about Wyoming makes me want to be a ground or a warhorse full of light that heroics into bluest space.
Poem for Early Morning
In this valley I am shimmering with angry and joyful fur. The grass is so soft that it can rip off your arm and you won't even be mad and your arm will mix with the river.
You will be happy for your arm and it's new life in the river among the fish and the dead monarchies. You will want to climb the mountains, but you cannot. The mountains aren't real. They are just some milk cartons I left there. You will want to drink the water but it is not real either. The valley is not real. The ground is not really there nor is the sky.
Only the juggler is real, tied into his pole singing of pigs.
Bears
Inside my head there are a lot of little bears. With their little hammers and chisels I can feel them building little towns and little walls out of little rocks that I left for them in my ears.
Maybe they will go to war with each other or maybe all of this will subside. Either way I just wanted you to be aware of what’s going on with me right now.
Wizardry
I smashed the green orb and crawled into the blue one like we discussed.
In there, all of my downy yellow feathers transformed dutifully and efficiently into earthworms.
They are giving me some useful spells.
Montana House
Everyone is getting together in the big house on top of the hill. We are discussing what to do about the water, which refuses not to have legs. It is not present at the meeting
I excuse myself and head for the bathroom. Inside, there are some foxes gathered around a campfire. They are speaking mostly in Icelandic I am pretty sure.
To the south there is a vast amount of trees. To the east, there is a small cottage.
Inside the cottage, a normal egg cooks in a frying pan and it is beautiful and it is unlike anything you have ever seen. At the exact moment it is finished cooking, the spaceships take the cottage away with them and upwards and all the trees collapse.
The audience cheers. It is all very confusing for me.
Big Sky
We are all in the same boat these sad townsfolk and happy I and it is very large. Large enough to have its own bodies of water and its own boats and its own trees.
Some grand illusionist has convinced us that this boat is floating in some sky and not an ocean.
A boat trapped in a boiling sky. Desert trees against an empty sky A red egg hatching in a very black sky
We cannot catch the rabbits and the deer with our silly traps.
The blue rabbits in a friendly sky The pink deer in a sky of finality
Poem For Late Morning
In the forest, the animals have important business to attend to They have important meetings to go to. Important animal shoes to make. This requires a large amount of invisibility and cloud-like movement and the occasional execution.
I am a ladder with no paint on. The ladder emerges from a pot of boiling red mud. It flies horizontally over a forest. There is a bird of prey on one of its rungs giving it directions.
I am forced to concede on the elk issue. Like you said, you are not an elk. Having seen a real elk I don't know what you are.
Really, I don't think I ever thought you were, just the question had handed a pair of scissors to the silence and it made me nervous
People/People
1. In the Sears a washing machine pops up from its hole in the ground, hands me a packet of seeds labeled "people"
I plant them out back in what the refrigerator tells me later is poisoned soil.
It is ok though. The seeds turn out fine when I check on them later businesswomen and firemen like normal.
There was one odd child with translucent skin, but he ran away.
2. In The K-Mart a geyser of people erupts
They are all wearing clothes of different colors. Some are wearing hats.
There is one boy who wears a bicycle on his shirt
It is whispering Its eyes are clear Its arms are radiant It is whispering It is whispering
Mammals
A bison evaporates venomously at an eagle.
An eagle melts at the cavernous bison.
In the midst of it the stapler cries stop this and dives into the river and contortionists into dead pine trees where they feel very elk.
Weather
You have the new hide and the old chain and neither one is a flower and both are a rainstorm.
It is a sweet rain that erases frogs.
There are even blackberries in it. So many leaves have been caught by your sticky skin.
Poem For Early Evening
1.
4.
I am in the water
Jacques Prevert and the water are in me.
reading Jacques Prevert.
The fly joins them.
A fly comes into the water.
None of them are reading anything.
I brush it away with my hand. Soon the houses come, the trees come My wet hand makes the book wet
a deer comes
to my chagrin.
and she brings some wild grass and the clouds come and the children they come
2.
and the men and the women they come
Me and the water
and the brewery comes.
are in a fly, reading Jacques Prevert.
Later snow comes and it brings some people with skis.
Jacques Prevert stands there as the fly disintegrates.
A lake comes to my left arm.
Then walks into the trees. 3. I am in Jacques Prevert with a fly and we are both reading the water.
A bear comes to my legs.
Some kind of very faint important planet comes to my head.
We go into the water, me and the fly, and build some houses down there.
Psycho Fishing Chapter One: How to Scream at Trout
Everyone is a clock. I am only eyes no the top of a head I am the leather strips on this lamp of trees. The air could be said to be bashing this lamp into my skull. My skull could be said to be a rhinoceros. I am a literal rhinoceros who has climbed onto a bridge made literally of chewed gum. Aesthetically, this is very nice. That is what all of the fishermen on the bridge think. They are attacking me literally with lamps. The air is literally setting all of them to 7:08 pm and laughing which makes me very nervous because I don't know what that means, but it seems pretty important
I do have to congratulate the pamphlets; the scenes of nature are pretty nice like they said. Now I feel bad for not believing them. And shredding them and making them into shoes that then combusted.
Psycho Fishing Chapter Two: Using Your Enemies as Bait
In a puddle a basket exists very slowly and does nothing else. Above it, a trout is rocking back and forth. Below it entire cities have escaped notice.
They put fish in the basket every so often. The basket could not be described as receiving fish. It does nothing.
They found me in the basket once. I had fallen quite a long way and had memories only of wax.
They are building statues of me now. Daily I tell them please to stop.
It has started to be more of a begging. I don't know the coordinates, otherwise I could tell you where to send the missiles.
I am sorry.
Poem For Late Evening
In the evening, I am a normal sized pig in a town where everybody has accepted the four mysterious holes in the sky and moved on with their daily lives.
Suddenly a windshield named death flits cautiously down and perches on my head. It offers me a bug. I say, no thank you I already have this bowl of tulips.
Up on the mountain there is a an eggplant covered in bees.
The mountain is actually your face and the eggplant is your nose.
Prophecy (Postlude to Montana)
Everywhere, there is a tree-husk Filling her mouth with cotton and standing on a rock
These are things that hover and point left.
Follow them on your bicycle. They will bring you to the cliffs that you need. The cliffs that have been given to us by carrots
The sun that is attached to your string will hit the other sun and the red door will open to horses