XXXVI

When I go to the river after the flood and take off my clothes

I hear the season and the cycle of the moon shouting for me

It smell like pesticide and cow shit from the flood last month

It was a tourist attraction where the red leaves smile and go down

The brush is dead by the flood and I look over my left shoulder at the new moon

I cant help it even though I know I’ll be doomed to be a starving bottom feeder

so I curse this season cuz I’m hexed by every new moon that hides its face like a lost actor behind the curtains and calls from behind the curtain and interrupts the show

That call it ring and ring like the sinkholes and ancient craters I got in my head I say

Man mother fuck If you think im gonna to answer that tell them I got a message

Hello fall sweater! Hello misfortune I’m gonna beat the shit outta you this time

Hows that for a howdy doo cuz I don’t even own a phone anymore

Hiding in the canoe that floated downstream I float away like a drunk’s mother

I used to float naked but now I drift wrapped up like a wound leaking it out

When I’m hexed by the new moon I don’t even bother looking at the shore

I know that upstream is cow shit and pesticide and that downstream is black

And on the west and the east shore I know there are my friends and my hearts like

Wet leaves stomped down on either side of the shore and spread out in a x all over

They was the hexes who mourned in their rooms where no one had been

They were the friends that saw the oprichnik’s with their dog heads

They was the boys that smashed the moonshine in the garden

All the boys spread out like a hex

made by iron nail boots that go all

over this goddam country and it’ll be moons and moons before I find em again

I see my ladies that I knew stiff on the shore like the huge graveyard in Queens

I see my ladies on the shore far off like the Spanish and the French and the Russian peasant bitches cooking their pots full of hearts and time and freshwater tears

I see the ladies and how

they got a hook where

one hand should be

and a white hankie in the other

When I float under the new moon and its hollows all the houses and all the trucks in the country and the woods of the north,

they all

Stand up like guilty germans wearing long coats in the rain

Stand up like ghosts in the bell tower without the strength to ring

Standing up like spiked bulls dangling their feet in the dust and dripping out drops

I lay down in the canoe and float by the woods because when I get where I’m going

It wont come as a surprise to none of these folks because they’re where they’re at

And I’m floating like a baby sneaker down the styx and I’ll keep wallowing until

This eternal new moon hex lifts its cross off my back cuz I aint no stinking jesus