Corpse's Lullaby, and: Golden Mean

Corpse's Lullaby

How long would it take to wrap my lover's body in red string?         How many skeins and how numb the bending fingers when done?                   How long would it take to weave my hair between the hairs of his body?

I could not give him a liver or a kidney, a lung or a tooth.         Like a lump of payment between us, I gave him nothing                   to record, nothing of note. I gave him nothing in the shapeof an aorta, sliced from my chest with a sure and delicate motion.         I gave him the nothing that fell like blown cotton from the sky and disappeared.

It took years to dismantle our house together, with each plank to sliver the planes         down into fine and bendable vines, years to turn the house from something solid                   in to something woven and curved, a set of abstract and fleshy haunchesin wood. There, across the prairie, rising from the peat, it stands. My love is my love         and he moves through the spaces I left open in the weaving. He returns                   to the nothing I made him and lies down there on the idea of my body.

Golden Mean

The dead cat, the rabbit carcass aloft.         Hanging over the fence, the jagged leaves                   between the lamps of golden fruit—a wedding, a wake, a wakefulness.         Along the roads of Vietnam / Iraq, sound sensors                   planted in the war registernothing they were supposed to—perhaps         a migration of birds, perhaps                   a storm coming from the mountains;meanwhile the armies march and recede,         the men make percussion on the ground                   with their bodies.We dust the oranges with pesticide         that bees feather over the flowers;                   they drop like swollen fruit,honey stuck in their bellies—A ducked chin,         a V of hair in the back, we watch                   the photos for signs of life:the act of unconcealing—a watchfulness and ticking.         I trade three oranges for the bayonet,                   melt the sword down to a ring,use the wood for a stake our tree will climb.         The fruit hangs over the fence                   from the neighbor's yard where theypoison bees and play the most beautiful music.         We bury the dead cat, we cover                   our faces in the blood of the rabbit.To understand what love has made of us—         golden, jagged, and swollen—                   we drape our bodies across the fences;we climb more deeply into the light of the sun.