[You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior]

You ask me to talk
               about the interior

it was all roadside flowers & grasses
               growing over the cities

was made of wilderness & sky
               with God washed out of it

was the foreign prayer-word
               it was a list of missing persons

was the solid bronze charging
               bull on the famous street

was like the Roman method for making bees

was its taken-down carcass
               & its bed of apple-branches & thyme

was a new anatomy      a beaten hide
               a skeleton sweetening to glowing fluids

& the bee born out & the grist of them born
               glistening as coins

it was anthem
               was the listening

the way a searchlight listens over a lake
               it was the prayer-word out of your mouth

your thousand-noun request
               it goes up up to the florescent weather

was hurdle & burn      burning through
               the infinite      your overbright comet

was made of stones      made of berries & plastic & boxtops & eggshells
               it was like the word having reached the ear

& the words pollinated the dark      there was darkness there
                             like the afterhours inside a library