Be it gentle or harsh, the words from my mouth cannot speak enough. We—that is the you that
is reading— and the I— that is— only know the smell of
day lilies or the cry of our
two-month old niece when the formula is unwarmed. Beyond
this. Beyond. This. Nothing. A wood owl sits
in my window, its tufts may speak to me, each feather ruffled
as a vowel and my eyes too narrow to be prey may be a
novel but owl and I can not talk. Cannot speak
of dead field mice. Cannot speak of day old sex. Can not speak
of coffee. Or other owls, white or plumed or brown. As I to you. If you do
not have an owl or a niece. What. What then. What can be known.
Sipping iced tea from a
tumbler in midday traffic,
I imagine cormorants
shadowing the brackish
water and gulping
cyprinids and sunfish.
This violence confined
to ripping fish flesh. These
scales luminous
and wrought
asunder.
Each I, each thou,
every fish bone,
is lacking taxonomy.
Wisteria and kudzu
combine on a lattice
across the street.
My Toyota pants
the engine idle as a
chicken hawk
that strip mines
the air. The waterfowl,
the minnow, the koi
I see on a pink-haired woman's
tattooed arm in the car next to me:
all signs. I think of the heron
dropping an ink-stained spine.
A fly lands green metallic
eyes and all on a corpse
what is not to be loved
the moment for antennae
the slide over hairs still
brown on grey skin
the beauty here beyond
the context beyond the
text beyond the given
language each blue
sky blue sky blush
sky bluer you can
see but not speak of
and if I do not tell you
or if I can not you will
not know the car wreck
on I-75 or the old man
whose second stroke brought
him down or the boy
stabbed four times with
a wet kitchen knife no
even if you did know I
could not tell you any more
I could not encapsulate
a life or even the hum
of a fly's wings if you
had not already heard
Derick sincerely believes that everyone needs to dance around their house naked at least once a week; in addition to that, being declared an ethicist has made him a general misanthrope. Most good ethicists are. He loves tomatoes and thinks that loving such fruit is profound. He does not like to speak in third-person because he understands that it is a sign of true insanity, but so is literature. He has vowed no longer to be witty in biographies that are included in literary journals of any medium.