LoveSettlement                                         the poetry of Glenn Ingersoll Poems previously featured on the LoveSettlement homepage Dogs will not return Does it matter whether John is walking across the blue desert by himself or if thirteen well-bearded chums jostle him, coughing, chuckling, drawing fine gauze over their moist lips? The state looks askance, its head wobbly, headwinds westerly, lines drawn willy-nilly between nuclear powers. He presses one hand over the sun, gleaming in focus among smokes, the smile of a rugby player ungapped, a rippling in the sky. The plane's tail disappears into a fog generated by laziness. There is no tear to save from the burning eye. Another boy, unchanged by the ash, steps from the whiteness of the cave. It's okay, he whispers. I am fresh out of problems, had a run on aches, the last bottles of boredom lonesome on aluminum shelves. He smoothes his bib, absently inserts his thumb into the deep of his navel. Who says you can't hold off six months for the precise sniff? The liver they put in him, he says, insists on living despite its distaste for his wrinkled kidneys, the off-key song of his wound intestine. Oh well. One day everybody must haul this skin bucket to the mountains. To remember the dance under pennants of carmakers -- it takes a long time. The hydrogen peeled from oxygen in one city or another? Years and counting. Where traveling shoes can't wait to be wiped of cobwebs and dog hair? That closet. Among ribbons not yet released from their Christmas knots an ancient need meticulously contracts. "Dogs will not return" was originally published in Snow Monkey * On the roof of the car many roads cross the windblown dewdrops blazed 4/11/03 Poems from Our March after Mang Ke's "Poems in October" tr. T. Barnstone Crops The picture of three men cut down to two. Two men and then one. The one as stern as when there were three. Labor They're trying to make the party political. Hang them. And into the twirling body seed lead, so when the future grows we will fill our bellies with lead. Fruit He's the kind of thing you want to see the juicy inside of. You have a thumb you want to plumb him with. You have a tongue to put around a section of his complexion. His chin an apple you'd bite. Woods The wind is the wind from the left lung struggling against the right as it enters the horn and stiffens. Lost, you prick an ear, to the distant bang of the barrier drum. Wind I didn't offer the arm you took, nor the liberties. I didn't offer sympathy though even the grass bowed. Path I have been tested, he said grumpily, feigning pride. Just look at my scores. The scars. Check out the grades up which he ground gears. Earth Gardens and gardening, flowers and flowering. Peoples and peopling, hands and handing it over. Graveyard Ladled onto potatoes, tipped from a boat onto a dry cut. There was enough of anybody to be anonymous though we're getting better at lying still. The drippings, ah! Eyes of the tuber, portholes steamed up. Dream The beauty of nature is inspiring. That is why I open my mouth, not to scream when I'm being bit. Poetry There is so much to see and do. Give me a head to dabble my feet in. No, no. I'm okay on my own, independent of schemes, my soles not measured for shoes. Sun Then again, when dawn gums up the works of sleep's carefully calibrated machinery you curse. The cock's a leave-her sort of bird and crows. Youth The land is old. The world, the world is old. The sea, the sea is all you'd care to see, I say. Go and when you come back let me know. Daybreak That's enough. They've strained it. The screen let the water through. It is the idea you want to put back with the execution, not the head. They've strained it. That's enough. Testament Leave it wherever. On a tree's bark, on a dog's. Work it in with a knife, or give it out on street corners and keep time with a tambourine. . "Poems from Our March" was originally published in Fourteen Hills. The Breathing Device Under the sea the mechanical lung and a bathing cutie, while in the sun, loving it, a gleaming fish. Now let's say water hugs the rodent, and the kangaroo beside the camel raises a tandoori flag. Let's say the toast sitting upright in the wind tunnel is edgy and calls for controversial testing. In the valley a brook scratches at a sandbar. On the mountaintop only the sound of a sound torn from indiscrete sound and stretched until the holes that open in it fill with mostly symmetrical crystals. Shine. If you want to. Heave. If that's the best thing. Urge. Cling. Bundle. Sizzle. Trudge. Meanwhile on the moon in a blind pose there is the desiccated eagle. On the red planet things resemble things, while wholly unlike them except for their curriculum vitae, the extending of which goes on under the bombardment of hostile solar rays and provincial presumptions. On the other side of the atom the tiniest of hee-hee-hees twitch like knees. I have a box for it. An ointment the skin weeps for. A traumatic towel. A feather-weight caiman, a mockingbird in plaid. . "The Breathing Device" originally appeared in Loop. Living The fire was burning last night while I was reading about the dead. It burned on as I wrote a few notes to myself. The cat came in and looked at me, then disappeared behind the couch. In a moment he'd leaped to the couch's rim and was going over himself with his tongue. I pulled him upside down into my lap. Kent was already in bed and now and then I could hear his indrawn breath. I drank orange juice so cold it chipped, driving a nail-long shard into the base of my skull. I closed my eyes and awaited its dwindle. The fire went on as it had -- timidly and furious, in snapping banners and raspy, catlike tongues. "Living" was originally published in Manzanita Quarterly. The reflection of the dropwort's fronds in the hubcap chrome Something of his evening, a word of it, at the far end of a thread stretching, yet stretches infinitely, sinking, the strength of the tether filing away until, dejected, somewhat spherical, word is gone from him. On the tablecloth the circle of a drop of oil. The baking tin rattles from the oven. Through the layers of curtain the jackhammer's pounding weakens to a tingle. At the tapping against the table leg of the girl's velvet shoe milk jitters in its jar. The guest spills soup from a raised spoon, coughing, not covering his mouth, his shadow precipitous under the high bulb. A red fly prospects the peeled apple. A day without weather following similar days. The watchful family of ghosts ripples like an untucked sheet in the draft from the door. The boy slugs his pillow, plunging his fist into the shape his head left in it. The heart monitor unplugged. A loud reverberating quiver of wings. "The Reflection" was originally published in Hawaii Review. I was holding in my hands a box which turned out to have my head in it. The box open, I stared out. Next to me on the table was a box that had the sky in it. "I was holding" was originally published in Work. And And Again I dreamed about a shoe. I dreamed about a hand. The hand crouched under the stiff tongue. I dreamed about a flag of flesh, dress gray. I dreamed about the river on which a shoe sat. I dreamed about the street down which a hand swam. When in my dream people died I learned nothing. Whether far away in the hills or here in my shoes. I woke up. Again I awoke. I will not forget the fear of my own skin, I thought. After each dream I would remember how to shit, the sound of my piss on water. I would remember how to eat, to drink. To get to sleep, I knew, I had to turn here, turn again there. But I could find only I'd forgotten. I knew the distance by its skin. "And And Again" was originally published in Hogtown Creek Review, Michael Martin and Elisa Maranzana, editors. Winged Man My heart fills, fills and empties itself, and what warms my lips pauses there. What strengthens the bones of my wings gets to my heart and through it. I have a lover in whose black eyes I see the night, the night I am in amongst stars. Lord, the grip of your heaven is a relaxed grip, as of a hand half-sleeping, as though, Lord, you were dreaming me up, your dreaming keeping me aloft in his eyes, the night in which my wings are strong. Your mouth is parted, Lord, and it is a sleep word you have spoken that none of us can remember. Or it was laughter. And I think that it pleases you, dreaming us upward. "Winged Man" was originally published in Carolina Quarterly where it won the Charles B Wood Memorial Award for Distinguished Writing. It has since appeared in Prayers at 3 a.m., an anthology edited by Phil Cousineau, pub'd by Harper San Francisco.