after Hieronymus Bosch

There’s no there there, no here here—

a timetable shows the missing trains, the fruit bowl longs for oranges.

We went ahead to lurch behind, booked

a passage so circuitous it carves

new dimensions in the tabletops. They’ve posted

soldiers in the laundromats and everything you want

Irradiates to dust. I wanted

to become a different human, left myself here

among the daisies, tied the horse to a newell post

and let him nibble all the oranges.

Sweet tongue to the fruit, sweet agronome—carve

statues out of butter to venerate the cows—your books

with all their fractured mirrors, diminish me, bookend

this life with the twin ghosts of hollowness and want.

Among all the things we might have carved

into trees or out of marble, not a single effigy captures the here

of our simplicity, the rolling hips of fields, the slutty orange

of trees that turn on you each fall. Whereas a fence is made of posts

the country’s made of crosses and we post

death threats on the clothesline flapping with the sheets. I thought a good book

could solve it all, the proper smile. Yet tyranny wears orange

trappings, a mine fire, a deposition. I want

something to put my body in, I want to feel the here-

and-now draw its tongue along my neck, carve

a cuneiform instruction manual in my shoulder blades, make me a carved

idol for this new century of cosmic meltdown. Write this on a Post-it

note and affix it to the future: “Here

lies the history of America, one big comic book

of medical interventions.” There’s a way to want

that’s simple as our minds. There’s an orange

sun fatter than the sky, an orange

demon on a blitzkrieg mission to barbeque oblivion. Carve

me a corner I might hole up in, give way to what you want

and want for nothing. All we have are postage

stamps from foreign places, an attic full of musty yarn. Strike a matchbook

to it all, flee the scene and we were never there.

I want so many things for us, post my hopes on a telephone pole like lost puppies

but the book is here, our names carved from its narrative—all lost, all devastation.

Peel and pith the orange holds its essence in its skin. Peel and pith its bitterness, too.