Someone arrest me
here in this city park where an ivory
heat combs itself in slow strokes
from the swamp. Where a jogger
and her mallow-jowled
Rottweiler have just
spontaneously combusted—only nipples
of the dog collar’s nickel
screwback spikes lie
in the trail’s crowsfoot violets. No
vertebrae. No clothes. The newspaper
knows a layer of methane
hangs over the water, ready
to spark. Or maybe it’s my dark
night terror that recurs
in which an old alchemist whispers
as she sits on my chest, sizzles
her palms to my shoulders
until my elbows turn
heavy as gold. I don’t need a cigarette
to set this trail burning. I don’t need
any learned advice:
Leave your man. Run
to another. One thought of you
will char this city. One thought
of that nineteenth-century
hotel with its ivy-drowsed
courtyard of brick where Poe
played as a child, where he whipped
a single chrome wheel
with a violet birch
branch until the stick snapped
between spokes. Where you wrapped your
black belt around my throat
after I asked. I hear sirens.
I hear the twitchy armadillos shiver
from the warp of a near
highway’s whine. In the water,
the cypress knees jut
their muscled limbs from the green
ferment, rigor-
mortised, white. Like those women
who kicked a long time before giving up
a finger, a red
dress, a breath, an over-
tongued name. Before each of them
gave her face to the swamp which, as I
pass by, remembering, flames.