the zoo, the farm animals, it had something

to do with captivity, flayed in the clinical light

the notes printed on the underside of his flesh

were reversed but readable mirrored in the metal

of the medical table and I wanted to print it all

properly in a posthumous book in the name

of prosperity and proof the genius we believed

he’d wasted had been waiting all these years

for a simple death sentence to break free.

BARBERISM

It was light and lusterless and somehow luckless,

The hair I cut from the head of my father-in-law,

It was pepper-blanched and wind-scuffed, thin

As a blown bulb’s filament, it stuck to the teeth

Of my clippers like a dark language, the static

Covering his mind stuck to my fingers, it mingled

In halfhearted tufts with the dust. Because

Every barber’s got a gift for mind reading in his touch,

I could hear what he would not say. He’d sworn

To never let his hair be cut again after his daughter

Passed away. I told him how my own boy,

His grandchild, weeps when my clippers bite

Behind his ear, but I could not say how

The blood there tastes. I almost showed him

How I bow my own head to the razor in my hands,

How a mirror is used to taper the nape.

Science and religion come to the same conclusion:

Someday all the hair on the body will fall away.

I’m certain he will only call on me for a few more years,

The crown of his head is already smoother

Than any part of his face. It shines like the light

In tiny bulbs of sweat before the sweat evaporates.

THE CARPENTER ANT

It was when or because she became two kinds

of mad, both a feral nail biting into a plank

and a deranged screw cranking into a wood beam,

the aunt—I shouldn’t say her name—

went at the fullest hour of the night,

the moon there like an unflowered bulb

in a darkness like mud, or covered in darkness

as a bulb or skull is covered in mud,

the small brown aunt who, before she went mad,

taught herself to carpenter and unhinged,

in her madness, the walls she claimed

were bugged with tiny red-eyed devices

planted by the State or Satan’s agents, ghosts

of atheists, her foes, or worse, the walls

were full of the bugs she believed crawled

from her former son-in-law’s crooked mouth,

the aunt, who knows, as all creatures know,

you have to be rooted in something tangible

as wood if you wish to dream in peace,

took her hammer with its claw like a mandible

to her own handmade housing humming,

“I don’t know why God keeps blessing me,”

softly, madly, and I understood, I was with her

when the pallbearers carried a box

made of mahogany from her church to a hearse

to a hole in the earth, it made me think

of the carpenter ant who carries within its blood