Improv: Bond's "Elegy"

This is a Mad Libs version of "Elegy." In the words of my grandfather, I done rurnt it.

Once I swore dying was the same light
from haste as sugar from peaches, the same
that plucked a pigeon's wing at night, a rostrum
I'd never clutch completely, I'd never hammer.

You know the feeling, I'm sure: the exhaust
that tends the refrain inside it, that keeps it overheard.

But if nerves are stemmed to a world in panic,
don't nerves too catch the flu. I want to believe

there is more truth in kennels of shins
than shins in any kennel that's truthful. But then

who could lose oneself inside a thigh
that never dies. One day our scaling turns

to calibrate the way a parable turns to its
remaining own womb. Is obstruction any less
the phantom, any less the preacher who compels
himself in the one he prays he won't

survive. One day a parable's elegy turns back
to say, don't I know you.

Improv: Bond's "Death Mask"

The hymnist irons his socks at night and calls me up,
tells me it's the end of the world, that I should move underground.
Last Sunday, during service, he flirted with Mrs. Dander
by the organ's pipes. I thought I saw him float up with the reeded air.
The hymnist has composed something not new but just new
enough, newer than the old and rugged and good and old;
he taps it out on the upright, a spatter of curious birds. I visit
with him in the fellowship hall, we clamber about
past the trays of micowaved, canned, corn creamed anythings,
he sweats through his suit, wipes down his face
with a used handkerchief--a theft--says I should take a good hard
look at which direction the grass grows, does it sprout up or lean,
should we follow and mask ourselves in a chorus, a verse,
an aria's fluttered peroration, in the signature the ground
forges across our faces' dotted lines.

Improv: Bond's "Homage to the Ear"

By the dim lamp in the corner, we stand witness to the ear without a body, something out of Blue Velvet or your father's formaldehyde cache. There's nothing but silence here. I think about your father and his ataxia. The way he holds his chest to the wall below that piece of Penley kitsch, like the way you examine the ear. Where did it come from? Who left it. It cries. We must keep it, hush it, whisper in sibilance, we will be happy I swear.

Improv: Bond's "Rock"

"Woody"
You who straps those cliched surfboards atop your skull, whose lost smoke echoes the loss of childhood, gum on the sole. You have no sense of wonder. And your name--chrissakes--an incantation unspoken here, in this crowd especially, who wears solid colors and eat bland, saltless foods. Okay, Surfin' USA, strap it on, rip it off, treetops, the swill of a wave like your spit in the toilet.

Improv: Bond's "A Diet of Angels"

So little to go on, the light heave of the zipper,
a disposition of flightless birds never so still,
sunken. She took me down the glazed

hill one morning, fumbling through sunflower
fields--a god's view. Somewhere is a word
between those words we throw like rocks

welling out of the hard ground. I fit
your glasses over the sunken hazel
and tell you we're visiting islands, any islands.

Improv: Bond's "Abyss of Birds"

What it must be to watch the callouses
fall from your fingertips. Drying dishes
in the key of C, keeping time with the waitresses's
tom, falling into your own monuments
or an angel's sword. It's a quartet you've
recorded years ago nobody's heard
that squeaks, squirms from the speakers
before you. Cerulean guitars
and coded words you can't even make
out now beckon to you like the angel
Gabriel--the mouthpiece of God.
Did he tell Lot's daughters to sleep
with him in that? Did he commission
the arson we committed that night
in your bedroom.

Improv: Bond "Body and Soul"

Where to find a good cup of coffee in the morning dark
where those old friends cook up little brown sausages
for their own sake, leaving you a stranger to the
ways the holes get it; the holes burrow between you
and the nameless hands before you and the place
you want to call home. Fall on your knees and tell
her you love her like a jazz drummer loves
a fake-book, without loving the mouthpiece,
emphesymic. The bridge and cough cling
to the oral roof like shingles. We are the rain.

Improv: Marks' "Dumb Luck"

My Ophelia with an itch sings, all the notes

a tad sharp, and wins. The line goes rifling
down into the carved rocks of southern KY,

the minefield we used to crawl through. When

the seasons change, we remove our clothes
but not all, and say people contain glory,

prose, all words living with us. But what
about the horse that won't rise,
what about his decayed meat? I have named
you, the horse, and your tomato. Dry me off

please.

Improv: Marks' "Bell"

I will not serenade you
with a chirr or the black bolt
of some distant bell, the falling
of the fifth string in that classroom.
You could ignore it all the way
to the bank in the morning. The scraps
of the evening and pancakes' clang
through your apartment slplit me
like your rust I can't help but shine
until nude, cavernous, holy.

Improv: Marks' "Semper Augustus"

Flakes and flashes of the same color, goes the entry,
and I can't help but think of you, the same age as me
but a different shade, darker in the evening fading us
into ourselves, into our own hues and shapes.

It is a beautiful flower, you say, though once
can hardly determine beauty of any sort;
no botanical garden (or other place we smoked

weed drunk) could ever exhibit its bloom

which now, in that light, accrues all that florin,
that demented coin and paper for its own
pocket, for you and your purse that sag
under your own weight. I, with an allegory,

set the record straight, and with a grin set
you into motion in my orbit, Andromeda
waltzing. We watch your movies and I spit
grains into my lunchbox for reminders.

Improv: Mark's "Lullaby"

I should be used to it by now, sleep that nails me to the door
in a heat even summer envies, all hair and sweat and sadness.
Throwing a deck of cards against the dingy wallpaper,
you can't help but caress something, a tuft of hair, a settled
settler, a body flung from a Volvo on a Friday night, a widow
of two. You want to sketch me, I oblige and ask
about your heart, she loves me she loves me not,
how it has failed you, can we drink espresso
in your chemo wig. your coldsweat logic.
I miss that. This lamp's heat puts me down.

Improv: Marks' "The Black Bear at Closing"

A figure to be reckoned with and a smell like getting used to the chickenhouse next door, she, the bear, takes the elevator to hell with you, and she puckers and wonders where you've been for so long, where the whiskey has gone, what you've done with Jesus down in the hole. The real fire, you say, has been smoldering and has finally extinguished. She, the bear, removes her garments, her fur and burn and love, and blasts you out with her hydraulic system. She's been hiding it this whole time, keeping you close to the Lord. His hands are so cold. Splayed by the numbers, the 1 through 13, you fall to your knees and say Amen, amen, amen.

Improv: Marks' "The Lake"

Deceptive, this calm, the way slow-toppling
waves bat our thighs, the way the mosquitoes'
wings pause on our shoulders as they proceed
with their nightly suck

of iron, the velvet-red swelling their bellies,
ours: empty. Where's your mother, father,
dementia-prone grandmother? Let us
plunge this johnboat into the lake

without their permission, flooding the foot
rests and our shoes that mingle with rotten
leaves in an admixture less than admirable,
let us stroke with a single paddle the depths

of this pond--though they call it a lake--
and we'll sink without effort in murk
and mire, those trite aquatic descriptors
since we're loaded on Jim Beam and whatever

we've got, let us be the shore, rather,
let the dock's benediction claim nothing
we own.

Improv: Marks' "House with a Bed of Tulips"

To the photo of her crow-haired father,
three years ago when he still took his own
shits, when neither you nor your forgetful mother
had to dress him, I said, keep it.

You must fill this album with things that don't exist,

it's in the contract, the wine's fine print,
the locked door and deal closing,

like your mother's yearbook photo with her braces,

brother, now dead, plunging his face into the night
air, chickenhouse teeth catching bugs. Your tulips
were never watered, I say, casting off the one
of your house before the flood. Your former husband
and you--or rather, more poignantly, the ex--
standing side by side before he blew
his brains out in the hospital parking lot,
sends the jolt of a cringe down my spine.

Improv: Marks' "The Poet's House"

Sits not on a foundation. Remember that city?
The one known for its lobster, for its annual parade
and 5K and not much else, the city tired of its hunt,
brushed away to the back pages of the poet's
biography, though it permeates his work:
the factories, the strip malls, that moment in the eighties
when the Rainbow Room spread wide its doors,
howled like San Fran in the rainy months,
the constant birdsong, the cough of winter.

Improv: Marks' "Hotel Fire"

Before we were led through the hotel's stairwell,
before you paused, telling me what you thought
of our neighbor's housecoat and pink slippers,
before that pregnancy test made itself known
to itself, to us, we lied pieced together
on those starched sheets in the steady,
open plastic of love. The alarm came
suddenly, imbuing thought into a thought
less tangible that we'd imagined. A cluster
of moments' explosions excised and examined,
Where would you like it, sir? hurried,
gasping, a breath like a dying leaf's. The fire
escapes' dull iron railing painted your fingertips
red, those flecks ironed into my wrinkled collar.
Where are you now, where.

Improv: Marks' "Three Bridges"

When the rains came I was spooning salt into a pie, the neighbors bleating
through the walls, the narrow, invisible cracks. I had to leave
it there--my mother's recipe--on the oven, away from the windowsill
where no steam would drift, where it would be beaten down or swatted
into the damp clay. I swear sometimes I hear a voice in the well.
The airhorn's distant movement sweeps us up, my daughter and
her cat, my husband and his Hagar, spits us like a plug
of tobacco into a silver cup. The voice in the well says that
the rain may never stop, and I am fine with my reflection there;
it must be what death is like, an attenuated hush, a roused silence.