Post-Oil

In our north wall? A vespiary.

And the sour apple’s gone dormant again.

Here, let me show you:

you have to play the pool table like space-time.

Hauled from the landfill,

the felted plywood warped with rain.

Skulls in a barrel, storm windows,

imaginary mathematics

scratched into a schoolhouse slate.

All this emigrated from the midden world

into the barn, my father’s slumping ark.

The felt bald with swallow-shit,

I rack the balls about the eight: listening.

My friend’s fiancée knew

what hurt ecstasy, what precise hunger

her body could glean and give the night

before she broke things off.

Before, after the storm, he led me

mushrooming under broken pines.

As though the corpse plant’s flesh

rose from his certainty the earth is dying.

Failure in the face of all that.

No matter how fine your grasp of things

quantum, extractive

the open field will have its way with you.

The barn will list from true, magnetic north.