NORMAN DUBIE

Afterword.

I
Euclid washing his marbled legs
in vinegar looks across to a slave
bathing in blood and milk—she is a blank
page of Tibetan exorcism huddled
alone in the shadows of tree-like vegetables—
the old lama
is eating, happily, roadkill, meat
stamped with the dark blue ink
of a canvas chinese truck—90 mph, listening
to the drone of a dying carburetor.

This holy man was turned
in his dream last night
by the three corpses of girls
joined at the hip
who starved over a bowl
of a thousand flowers.

These ghosts of flying wedge
are warning Euclid alone
of poor solids
and planes of conjugating angles
become the future shortages
of coal, asparagus and pork.

The dead girl polymorphs
swept over Euclid
looking for weight against
a wind that doesn’t exist
in time
but only in space. . . .

Over Diem, Tracy, and Jacqueline
here, I have said
grace, the knives and forks
arranged like rock glyphs
of a desert passage.  Now
they must first survive the simple crossing
of a poisoned summer lake.

II
The turtles in the lake are halves
of lemon, a clean signal
from summer to a forgotten winter haystack,
tenement of mice open
to the old owl’s census—    his tree
begotten of a peach lichen, improbable
tree, birth of glacier,
in it the snow
grows like the master’s beard—

that is the thing about the summer
it scrapes both knees
and runs to the mother.
Euclid, all morning,
sharpening the nail of his compass.