Matthew Rohrer

Then don't think about a fox running around a barn,
he suggested, a small red fox
highstepping through the grass in the dark-grey shade
of a light-grey barn, the day stunningly bright,
the insects stunned and idling.
For days I thought of nothing
but this fox --- at night I was horribly buffeted
on an immense game board.
And my little body was a lighthouse of pain.
And it filled with a mean, red heat that was not relieved
by the coloring books delivered to me.
But when I think of this fox now, he does not run around the barn,
he stands utterly still, with one paw raised above the grass,
in a long dark swath of shade. He does not move at all.
Pain is locked away in the barn.

They learned to turn off the gravity in an auditorium
and we all rose into the air,
the same room where they demonstrated
pow-wows and prestidigitation.
But not everyone believed it.
That was the most important lesson
I learned -- that a truck driven by a dog
could roll down a hill at dusk
and roll right off a dock into a lake
and sink, and if no one believes you
then what is the point
of telling them wonderful things?
I walked home from the pow-wow
on an early winter night in amazement:
they let me buy the toy tomahawk!
As soon as I got home I was going
to hit my sister with it, but I didn't know this.

We could hitch the Horses of Instruction
Twice I heard them under the window
Under our flophouse, lousy with towels
Stamping under a moon
How many moons have circled our leaking heads and hearts?
One
The same one every night, hitched to the Horses of Instruction
It's a heavy heart they drag through the hills
My heart sinks into the couch
Yours into the sink
We believe Love lives in the heart
Which goes in and out
Why did they teach us that?
We want to pin it to a constant
Let's pin it to a comet
It'll return

The history of the world
is the history of rural malcontents
rising up against the capital.
Each night I hear something scratching
to get in my fortress
which can only hold out so long.
The cat thinks something lives in the radiator
and puts his mouth to the vent -- its breath.
No man is an island. Also, no one is interested
in excessive indeterminacy. The French
will eat the horse right out from under you. That,
and so much more, have you taught me, World.
Your products will collapse after a short time
and we will be forced into the streets for more.
It is possible to live only on what you grow yourself
if you eat little and lie very still.

is an imaginary flower that never fades.
The amaranth is blue with black petals,
it's yellow with red petals,
it's enormous and grows into the shape
of a girl's house,
the seeds nestle high in the closet
where she hid a boy.
The boy and his bike flee
the girl's parents from the tip
of the leaves, green summer light
behind the veins.
The amaranth is an imaginary flower
in the shape of a girl's house
dispensing gin and tonics
from its thorns, a succulent.
This makes the boy's bike steer
off-course all summer, following
the girl in her marvelous car,
the drunken bike.
He was a small part of summer,
he was summer's tongue.