Adam CLAY


 

Song Made of Fragments


Fist of bad liver, coughing dog, an egg
Tossed at a boy's back in his front yard,

Falling, breaking on the ground. Syrup
Warmed in a pot-his father barely sleeping

By the time he woke up, found the pancakes,
Cold, the thermos and its coffee, lukewarm-

Like the whiskey on the shelf above the stove,
His mother slept until noon when the dog

Barked her up towards cotton and alcohol,
Away from knock-knock dreams, the turntable,

Singing cause there ain't no wheels on this ship
Turned down low so as not to wake the dead,

But the dead don't sleep-they wake the living,
Dig holes that no story (who's there) can fill.

 

 

 

Aristotle's Bathwater


This faucet is a shadow of my lyrical memory.
This memory is a coffee pot on a hillside you forgot to switch off.

 

 

 

October Oxbow


Dear R-As of noon today, frozen lake, trapped canoes, the sky
Pouring geese from the clouds into piles of snow

And like the myth of The Wrath of the Lion's Island,
I noticed but refuse to react to weather. If my houseboat

Were a public library, the texts would be written in cursive on kites
Detailing the history of the hemlock tree like words

And smoke, you said over the phone, miles
From the south, are the nerves that keep borders

Up and us from grocery shopping on the same avenue where the aisles
Have dogs who bark sometimes, but mostly whine sighs

And stinks you would rather translate into signifiers
Than sleeping here. Leave Chicago. Listen: all needles have eyes

And lovers sleep inside dead metaphors-so forget the ram stuck
In the thicket, Ferdinand, Vico, all those devils fickled into wearing
black.








back