Called II like the great camps of our century
wandering eternally empty now and howling

in immense darkness darker than we had imagined,
called second out of the lunatic minds where animals

ran freely, unnamed and unheld, in that state
we also called darkness but that was spangled

with unknowable light

                                              there we gathered them                                  

the child in her white hazmat suit, the bird worshipped
as a king, the dummy who spoke only for himself, the hand

living without a body, tied to a long string; lunatic
as in the moon we could not live on for long

laughing above us all with a pleasure huger
than any human joy, while our camps are doomed

to roam: the girl with one eye shut all the time is gathered,
the man covered in straw, bound in straw is gathered,

the human moth is gathered, the cat larger than life
is gathered, the woman's body encased in too much skin

is, the unbearably beautiful dead boy soldier is, the bird
he strapped to his back is brought in with all the rest of them,

there in the howling camps where flowers bloomed
out of nuclear waste and the face was covered in cuttings

of paper and the remoteness of the territory
in no way suggested its strangeness, or its beauty

__

This piece is from a series of poems tangentially related/following on from the ones in the Dancing Girl Press chapbook (those deal more directly with family history; these depart pretty absolutely from that. Both sets of poems are interested in texture, horticulture, taxonomy, heredity/familiality). I keep a set of images for the poems (to generate connections/as places to begin) [here].