Oseberg Ship

Your inscrutable face, dishes of ash
lain on a bedside for thousands of hours
following the knotted sheets down
the fire escape. Lakeside river meets sand
at a romantic belt buckle overturning
the ends of conversations to find bugs,
little bugs to crawl underneath fingernails.
Good to remain tiny, good to pull out
infestations, good to roll up the fields
and smoke them into bits and pieces. Yes,
your festering body, vulgar slang’d
the rest of the night, regardless of every
landscape mentioned or rebuked, but I
kept my arms in good time, and carried it
all away like an eventual Viking. Down
to the water we slept darkly. Across rivers
there were more anthills lovingly
thoroughly appropriating each morsel, arthritic
but watching.

Similarly I have sat bedside stricken
with the joys of being intransitive, coming
down off a sky so blotched, I could not
overcome the easiest means of thinking.
Heels scraped in the center of a murky
park folding a membrane found previously
to a something they might if you
really believe you have nothing. Venom
puddles in elbows brown good to be close
enough to your face, heaving stones over
and over the river, cornering the new
insects on islands we can hardly touch,
can hardly tie down. The too-religious
praying mantis. The orbiting scorpion.
Yes, with a cinched moment I see again
pretty daisies on a shoulder, a following
guttural oh no. Given I have not remembered
taken I can’t care take off this shiny
metal buggy you little moth you tiny cockroach,
I have not remembered the last inch of
shore to the rivers on fire.