LUKE BUCKHAM

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AND I WILL LISTEN

(for Bill Gnade)

Give me an ear down in the soil,
let me hear the boiling of our core.
And my startled heart not add to the earth's damage.
Sorrow has gone so deep in me
that my soul has begun to fly.

Give me a hand that strokes ears of corn
like blonde toddlers born of my wife,
who likes snakes as much as butterflies.
Give me a hand that makes wine from dead bark,
sneaks quarters from behind the moon's ear.

Give me an ear for music, that I might hear
such instruments as never need make speeches,
such things as speak their only theme in holy whispers.
For the womb inside my ear has begun to break.
Give me a trumpet-sound like a cockroach's mouth.

Ear me an earth shaped around its drums,
five whistles from the cricket's legs before the kettle falls,
a body like blowing grass when false alarms sound,
an orange split-second painless apocalypse in one dawning pupil,
a planet made floating shards to set us free, the last chords
having been played for my ears that now are yours.