Condition
For some, it don’t mean a thing without the swing
of a gavel and a trace of doubt can trump
a circumstance.
Oh beautiful for skies
too small.
Today, the paper boasted this—
Five Local Policemen Tied to KKK—
italicized as if to shout, It’s new.
This.
When I went outside, thinking I knew
something of Frost’s birches, that endless swing
of left to right, the day managed to trump
up stillness.
Today, I’m reading noon. The sky’s
pastoral. Cumuli passing for this
creature or that one, stallions, maybe K-
9 dogs, maybe the alphabet with K
then O, maybe this sentence: That kid knew
he had no business here.
I spot the swing,
far off, of scales. The winning suit and trump
card in a game of spades.
Today, the skies
are angled sides in the A frame of this
old house we built and then forgot. There’s this
rafter, rotting, sort-of looking ok;
but, later, it ages to wood all new
and gnarled. Every knot a knee. The swing
of a young girl’s legs.
Today I told Donald Trump
the story of a woman. How the skies
came out of her wherever. Spacious skies.
Dark skies. Grown woman skies. Coalsack at this
time of the month spreads deep. That kind-of K
you see in Crux, that’s her. The bloody new
moon, her. Yessir you’re going to have to swing
a big dick if you’re going to hit it.
Trump
came out of triumph. Trump (verb): play a trump
on; win a trick.
Tonight, I’m running skies
through my sewing machine, connecting this
evening to morning, hand stitching a K
for force. It isn’t dark enough. My new
windows need black-out shades.
Tonight, the swing
of things. Tonight, ok, if any world
was new. Ever. If swinging skies were waves,
rip tide, and spume. If Trump.
If even this.
“Condition” first appeared in the Bennington Review, Fall/Winter 2016 (2016)