The Willow and the Living GodPoems, 20102011Lewis LaCook

Underwater radio

Let me take this opportunity to unplug your bathtub radio before febrile downloads ignore our implicatedlatex, thus complicating us far beyond what I would call our network address, or what I would call ournetwork address, or what have you. Now there’s email. From time to time I type without focus, and wheredo those characters go? Individuation? Divine interment among your libraries, grazing on the ridge? Isthis everything you remember about before you were born? We here don’t like to think of culture as acaul over our spanking new faces. The sun tells me when it’s afternoon by pinning the willow’s shadowback into the forest, broken and curling into brush last landscaped to ridge. You can be too precise. Youcan be pretty on petals, bicycle migration, you can be printed on this dearth of leafage, and you canassimilate no concealment, at your leisure. Don’t you remember anything else?You’re obligated to underwater radio.

Continuance, carpet

Ahem. “The warm November.” The warm November. “An alarm, either your phone or mine.” Analarmist rails to empty urban streets, far removed. There’s coffee in the office. “And now we download?”Yes, now we wind down, sad springs gushing from crotches. The more popular diplomats ogle you, and Ido, too; there’s no escaping your body, such obvious transgression. “On a continual carpet of dry leaves!Are you nervous about ground?” I’m enough man, and happily animal. I am all hands under shirt for you.We know winter so far only by how old the light looks, streaming over the rise of escarpment. What thiswas before was an earthquake, a lake. “An apartment above an apartment.” This arc goes on and on,because the planet turns.Your hem sketches Arturo G. Fallico, warming my November. Apt and tightened spring.