The Uses of a Symptom, or, Country Poem #9

80 TIM EARLEY THE USES OF A SYMPTOM, OR, COUNTRY POEM #9 The Lord is a bloviating concupiscence, Treenie says. Often, the carpet is olive drab or Islamic green and the villagers love their goats and the Lord is a loom and everyone has at least one hole and it is easy to confuse wisteria with dainty railroad spikes. Often, the Lord is subtextual, suspended in amber, or an ingredient pile. We play Sudoken. The peal of church bells smells like saperavi. Then some holy mechanism: induction flume, coins flipped on the pallor-drench, offal, caulk, and wire sucked into the architectonic swiller. We play rusted shit can and toad mal-flecked in the sun. We are loofahs in the steerage, Treenie says. Magnolias do not grow here and what can be gathered runs quickly to seed and fawning pasture spirits are out of the question. The Lord is a redbug is a tiny filter and is trying to be all rust-colored and funny and tap tap and hambone . The baby says he is not even trying to come out. A true word is a beautiful word. Nice out. Lyceum out. Treenie says, my horse is a piquant undead brute and wild about the wrong kind of berries. Gethsemane is a nice word and the horse’s name, the horse’s mane, the horse’s amen. Treenie plays her fiddle like a violin. She plays her telescope like a telescope. How many rear guard actions it takes to insuperate the pines is how many antinomies it takes to cover the birds in sugar for their deaths, this new staging, this redecoration of birds, this invest, these birds now with class ultimate & teleological. We play monocle and the long creep of official war literature marls our brains, goat-holes filled with shiny piasters. Cadence is the Lord’s evidence, Treenie says. Treenie plays her fiddle like an assless bird. Often, just after some “post-ephemeral spasm of presyntactic metalinguistic urgency” the sun fills the heart with an acre of blood. ...