BODES


around the well bodies
circled peering

                 birds
      pulsed and pearled
      their budding song


to suffer this 
in place, awaiting


water
             behooves
                                 horses

         furled in stay



     *


              unbit
    and
                         burst

                         abide


      *



tibet

tarry, carrier

            then fly,
  portend


             while we
             border,
               perdure

ill in tolerance the west
circles as time stuck
stockpiles a conic stand:

               high olympus
heads off home


        *



Olympus is a big canonical dick that spurts out 
medals (and occasional cantos) celebrating the 
deeds of singular and heroic individuals. Believed 
to be contracted by excessive handling of these 
medals in the course of their exchange for new 
and Chinese Orange Counties, overseas development, 
oil fields and advertising dollars, Olympism is a 
condition in which this dick sprouts from the public 
foreheads of Snopeses as they invoke their gods 
against the CNN syndrome, where gore-spattered 
photographs render us incapable of distinguishing 
between politics (the intermarriages of these gods) 
and elementary realism (the desire to keep our blood 
inside our bodies). “You can buy them critters if you 
want to,” he said, “but me, I’d just as soon buy a tiger 
or a rattlesnake. And if a Snopes offered me either 
one of them, I would be afraid to touch it for fear it 
would turn out to be a painted dog or a piece of 
garden hose when I went up to take possession of it.” 
At five o’clock the Texan will have crumpled the third 
paper carton and dropped it to the earth beneath him, 
and all but two of the deadly ponies will have been sold 
for sums ranging from three dollars to six hundred 
million dollars. We are between, abiding, waiting to 
discover with whom we will have turned out in droves 
to identify. A masked chorus fills the screen for hours 
with the introduction to song.