IRON YARD MUSE
She reads lists, the kind
that rattle off their ancestors,
their various titles,
or types of wild berries,
condiments or flavors;
I've yet to hear a list of colors.
She roll-calls the names
of relatives dead or missing,
some painted the shade of sidewalk
or shades of closed-down-mill oxide.
She throws me fisted poems,
chains of twisted word problems,
rarely her own. With Roethke's
tattered book in her hand
she delivers the body of Saginaw,
not to praise it. I listen to
the numberless items she keeps
on a spool of unending dreariness,
never far from her fascination
with the monochromatic, the microbial.
In each gray detail of architecture
cold slabs of reality are served up
as she slams down
her metallurgic reactions
like a frosted beer, sweating bronze.
ŠJimmy Warner Design, 2010
