VOICE AS IMPLANT

for Maurice
wood work
that "with the exact temperature
of a cardinal's nest" is ruined
feeling it

this is the paranoiac-critical
mechanism of speech

a merry triste
a blue bugger

to regard would be incongruous
the roots are fine

and silent, tipped in the way
of madness the hammock far into antirrhinum buds
delicate issue of cloth an oak tablet
you're to work, root tips licked
by this common edge

a reedy bend, a Tell weakness
crutched neck owned
gets things, like a bed,
in it too. At this point whited

dandelions, that many, ready, swayed
speaking inadmissably at intervals
admissably, wisely, as the race
is doomed to require a breast
be a cardinal's temperature
and so quit its women

my neck is a cardinal's
a pain nest as Paul
Verlaine's ass became,
became Rimbaud.