Anatomy

This cigar box cemetery
will sit soon enough
on a high shelf
among the dusty books that--
read once--will not be read
again.

Like words
on marble monuments
the names are inscribed
floating on the glistening head
of a metallic erection.

An eleven year old
copies latin with handsome pretense
but these signs
tell us less
than nothing...

The learned
speak of life and death
and reproduction
in the same suffocating spirals
as this child's dried calligraphy.

If we would be a student
only of the colors
this would be
something:
the electric heat--
blue and pink--imagined
by a dragonfly,
the saffron sunset
on the mariposa's wing,
the ink and eggplant
of the beetle's excited armor,
the grotesque green
(envy, nausea, greed)
of a horned, still writhing
caterpillar
vomiting his fears onto the walls
of the bell jar.          

Summer is an undertaker,

chloroform and cotton balls,

the neat and nervous 

pins that finish us 

and then forget...