TED MATHYS

Inventory

Box springs plus mattress where we barely slept

together, storm-torn of our scent, exposed

black coils, abandoned, a ribcage

on a drift of snow; three cinder blocks stacked

in a miniature plinth, absent of statuary,

as if their sole purpose was to buttress

the time of our singing or the ceiling of the sky;

between two skylights, a steel ladder fastened

with ladder jacks, empty rungs up the slope

of a wet slate roof, no one ascending

toward the wet crow at the peak, pacing;

an abandoned wok, silver and overturned

at the base of the air shaft like an ear to the ground;

the first story I couldn’t remember, the second story I had to forget;

the wooden spoon beside me, ovular and still

in the shape of your face; the wet crow appears

to be staring at me, I appear to be staring back,

there does not appear an exit, no escape;

only the coolness of this wrought-iron fire-

escape railing, alone with its shadows, its angular blue;

screw these fingernails, too damn healthy; a phalanx

of matchsticks stuck in the flowerpot; the daddy

longlegs drinking from a puddle of milk;

how each escape seems merely wrought; the former

iron and fire hovering somewhere above the first

story I couldn’t remember, the second story I had to forget;

while on the third story ledge our suicidal cat, no more, no

less suicidal than when you left, still bats his scabbed

boxer paws toward an invisible canary beyond

A Bias Toward Strings

A martial formation of buses pregnant with eighth graders making

successive lefts to the semaphore of a traffic cop. A two-step

and two breaths ambrosial with whiskey becoming casual

sex no strings attached. The tense and tension shift of a strung

out cowboy boot salesman as he roasts cocaine on a spoon.

Garden hoses coiled by a wort bucket of brew in the basement.

Waiting for his call the t of today meeting the s of her yes

in copper wire causing the cordless to string. A basketball net

frozen into a trapezoidal funnel and the basketball arrested

halfway to completion. The r from a shoestring on a boy’s lost shoe

waking the wasp to sting him on the sock. A snake of snowmobile

headlights at night cutting a radial path toward the center of a lake.

After a brutal facemask a bench-clearer ejections suspensions

a second string quarterback getting the start. The sac of spider eggs

wound fast with spinnerets mislaid in a sow’s eye and the spider

ascending its string to the beam. The n out of no toward the now,

the i out of is toward the am. A woman in the rear of a funeral

procession at an intersection floating through the g of green and gone.

from Scatterpaw

~

YOU CAN TAKE YOUR PUREBRED GREYHOUND

and shove it. Or you can take your purebred Greyhound

and race it. If you shove it and it topples, you abbreviated

too closely its genealogical sycamore,

which is why it’s lying there with a cleft

palate, retinal atrophy and hemophilia. Shoot it. If you shove it

and it stands its ground, shove it again. If again

it won’t topple it’s because you’re tautological.

Your purebred Greyhound is the most loyal

because it is the strongest and the strongest

because it is the most loyal to you. If you don’t

take your greyhound and shove it, but

take your purebred and race it, it will throw mad

for Sparky the fake rabbit on the oval handrail

across the circuit, ending in Wheeling,

where my genealogical sycamore is thick and several

branches ago a coal miner met his psychopomp in the shaft.

Disaster, slag fall, murder, cave in, methane, all

we know is my great-grandfather

coming home in a helix of dust and soot in

his socks, extending his arm to his wife.

Don’t ask me no questions, Pearl. Burn

my boots. Going to Indianapolis. Just burn my goddamn boots.

~

THE YELLOW FLYSWATTER is innocuous

enough as an instrument in and of

itself. As a physical

object the yellow flyswatter is necessary

for the formation of identity. When the twisted wire

handle is in my hand I become self-

aware I am an agent of death. I am an agent of death with

or without the yellow flyswatter but were there is a dearth

of flyswatters I might forget I was an agent of death,

maim wantonly, inadvertently. Admittedly,

I am not an avant-garde lesbian poet from Allegheny.

In Bryant Park Stein’s bronze form sits Indian

style on her plinth during Fashion

Week like the last kid picked

for a game of all out dodge ball.

Pigeons are democratic with crap, an omen

in the Caribbean but not on her lap. I visit her

with a yellow flyswatter. I am I and I am

tenderly wiping white excrement from her buttons.

“I am I because my little dog knows me,”

she says. She says the opposite of what she means, she is

binary. Yellow flyswatters make her an agent

of death but her little dog does not

make her a grownup. “Stop

rubbing my buttons.” She says exactly

what she means, I recoil, scoop

up her little dog, we leave

with the yellow flyswatter, we try

to let her be to be her to be when is it that they are shy

~

WHEN HER GUNDOG DISREGARDS entreaties

to return, Penny names him Sadness after

which he hurdles the crick with an obliterated

pheasant flailing in his jowls. Later

replaced by sloth, sadness was among the original

cardinals. When a sin is deadly depends

on God the Devil and the Pope.

God is down to earth the Devil is up

to earth but the Pope, Penny, and Sadness

are of the earth and the earth is rife

with pheasants fit for ammunition.

Penny sates herself on fowl

sautéed in bacon fat and apple cider while Sadness laps

water from a pail, waiting for a gizzard.

Onscreen the Pope chastises Castro and verges

on decay. Penny licks

her plate and fork and eyes

her shotgun propped in the corner

near a plug and a pile of skeet. Pull.

Sadness is hungry but patient, sadness is quiet,

loyal, curled on the floor. Pull.

~

THE UNEARTHED MESOPOTAMIAN

terra cotta bitch statuette couldn’t give a rat’s ass

about Benji, Old Yeller or Rin Tin Tin but each

has been conceived as a vestibule for faithfulness.

The Cynics contend that Argus should have barked

and held out for gifts from Odysseus before keeling but having

waited for decades and passed the test

of knowledge and ignorance by recognizing disguised

camaraderie where humans couldn’t, he exercised

his right to lick a calf, urinate in a circle, die

immediately on the slate. Freud’s love of his chow

marred his theory of abjection and the human condition

of excrement abhorrence, which falls utterly

apart with litter laws. When the Upper

East Sider walks her chow through the park

with a plastic baggie on her fist and we watch

her lovingly collect steaming scat, it is the only

avenue for feces to enter into the social

consciousness of our advanced industrial urban society.

Yes, we are cynically walking our beagle off-

leash to pick up chicks but there are two kinds of candor: acceptable

candor, which is self-effacing, and unacceptable

candor, which is candor. Gentle reader,

I am not deft enough to coddle you but Argus was

the first and only true philosopher and last

night I tied one on and tried to eat

an entire tulip hoping only to open

my mouth and hear something other than the silent

dog whistle of breath.

~

IF I WERE TO TORTURE ONE PETER STUBBE

I would not decapitate him before burning him

as his dimwit torturers did for getting doped up

on a pharmacopeia of nightshade and henbane based

by a salve of pig fat turpentine and olive oil to shapeshift

into a werewolf and kill sixteenth century German inhabitants

with his mightye pawes leaving the Armes & legges of dead

Men, Women, and Children scattered up and down the feelds

to our great greefe and vexation of hart. If I were

to torture one Mr. H. I would not use electricity

as his amateur torturers did for ingesting LSD and a pinch of rat

poison to shapeshift into a werewolf and abscond with the verve, go

AWOL from the Army training camp in the Black Forest seeing fur

on his hands and face, chasing down and devouring

live rabbits. If I were to torture these men I would torture them

brutally with battle tools from the Age of Chivalry –

Morning Star, War Hammer, Battle Ax, Daggar, Flail, Mace, Glaive,

Partisan, Bill and Catchpole and when it was done

there would be very little carrion for the dogs to feed on.

If I were to torture these men the torture would not be

for lack of understanding, which would be moral hubris for me,

nor for total understanding, which would be spiritual torpor for me,

but because I am in them and they are in me and though I am I

because my little dog knows me, they are they

because they know the forest in ways I do not.