Ordinary life going on and then
buzz woof thud unseen in desert,
pantry, pond. More sinister than
mosquito biting sleeping man
is that thing now hulking about or
inhabiting flesh and will already.
See how they mow their yards
at first and kiss their kisses
while all the while that
trembling gob waits to change
lives past recognition or repair.
from the Danny poems
Even when the monster is finally
gone, the monster has returned, the end of
the movie begins, left over from the
last thrashing: the brand, the burn keyed in.
No matter how far away you get or
how small you make yourself, the monster has
your scent, wants you, cannot live without you
as much as you cannot live with it.
You may know our secret history but not
its secret plot, our words though what we say
no longer lives in them—so close to see, so
close to not. You may know us if you find
beneath knotted jungle our dilapidated
temples and winged bridges, our fortresses
with gates of woven iron, but will you see
in our universe of slide the places where
we found our mortality? Unknowable
now those complex scrims so like the real thing
they thrilled us from afar, or our enemies,
soft-footed, but unable to resist comment
on their stealth, coming in loud as the geese
that flew in from our fairytales, their burdened
skirts and later immolation. But still
to be known the umbral armature of
last words and last things, and the monster that
lives along the river in whose shadow
children, and sometimes lovers, disappear.
Accidental Antenna 