--- H E R M A N   B E A V E R S

1
Click of consonants and vowels. A joke no one gets. You could think of
the heart of cool lettuce with shame. Proximate gospels. Choir the
light. Add salt, small gems, threshings of pain grown up out of the soil.
In Washington, men at some sort of ease, with epaulets in place of
shoulders, might take a knee & sing just so the roof will stay up. If,
say, the roof is on fire, dead people could be designated as French,
feed themselves with their left hand. Push food into slack mouths off
dishes of pewter & ivory. 


2
Men cutting stone until my father chokes on them. Hands roughened to 
the shape of soft bread, I pause in the basilica reading the heels.
Funerary circles, alignment in fifth form: regiments of laundered rags, 
a reckoning of henged stones. Pyramids with their bones sung into 
place, one atop the other in B#. In a cathedra of fan-shaped radiance,
folks turn & look at the dust on my heels. The ring of stained glass
echoes throughout the burial chamber like some translucent guitar. A
texture equated with the divine, bread is the wonder of life, a distant
skyline rising. My hunger safe as any riven star.