In the Spider

In the spider of our wheels

A starfish holds us at night, demanding our body be still.
                    We still,
Like coffee poured into a too small astronomy,
Less alive than heartspoke.
                    Still, as grass slept wet with Sunday,
In the morning we rise low,
A bed of drunken moss
With split baseballs for pillows.

Creeping jenny bites the ankles off leopard plants,
And what falls back asleep is now orange,
Tasseled, & alive with smoke.

This garden measures itself with duct tape & sighs,
So stubborn, so bent on spiders having a ruler
And a will of their own to stick hard numbers to.
It's as if we were still small children hilled numerous as sky with sugar,
Webbed with cobbled-thumbprints and cookies to touch thumbs to;
                Imprinting sweet dogs back into the wild flail-teeth of the edible world.

It was your birthday then, so much your birthday we followed
The whole of the garden-map, even past the observatory,
Past the weddings and the wedding above the weddings,
Past every foreign flower thrown past the pathed-sight of frogs.

As a child gloved in oil and youth
I was purple as the day longs royally for more length
And I wanted the stars as my baseballs
To bat like eyes and prove a great park hit upon beyond,

                That I wasn't boy nor girl nor wink nor tear.

A bee held me these nights,
Salving my face with murderous sound,
               Yet still

There was so much rolling terror,
Broke-wheeled terror age whites out
& loses the strength to remember,

Struggling finally through a garden of airports
Which rain a network of spiders and dark-bloom webs
Till all the rolling luggage breaks like a grieved face into a green pond

Starve-littered like a baseball diamond wired-home with a holocaust of flies.
Even your friends' wives leave, like every dark yet known to flower,
And still you've only wanted what "men" want

And not even, yet still, with the tiniest dignity of a child, any person,
Seeking other eyes, a power of spiders restrained
                Heavenward as gymnasts above our spoke wheels.