APOCALYPSE WEDDING

      Light gallops in, signalling the start of the apocalypse.

      Soon it’s beard to beard with itself like white bison,

       as thick on the floorboards as the train of a woollen dress.

      For one spooled second everything glows,

       then the world starts tipping from its crate.

      My mother, who knew in her wicker-backed certainty

      that the wedding would be a disaster,

       now stands balanced on one ear in the impossible gravity

       and is vindicated, backwards: the disaster is a wedding –

      the foundation cleaves, cat’s cradle, to an aisle

       as the ground unravels.

      There I go down the centre to the white

      and everyone else after.

      In times like these, which cannot even be called dark,

       Uncle Charlie makes the best of things.

      He serves up saints roasted with onions

       from his backyard convection oven,

       whose helicoid heat plays songbirds on loop.

      The bridesmaids have all watched too many zombie movies,

       shriek in chorus, hike their dresses to wade

       across the newly liquid river of the atmosphere.

      Even the silver lining is blinding.

      ALMANAC

      High on the hunch of the rattlesnaking slide, she bet I was the kind to piss the bed. Howled it out of the blue as she humped a sun-blind wave, like birds squall portents as they fly from power poles. The brick eardrum of the August schoolyard cracked.

      It was news to me, kid-iotic as I was, poking a stick into an aluminum can, imagining I was a T. Rex or a saint. Bits of nature, gulls, grasshoppers, stalled cock-eared in the wake of her yodel, the lightning rods of their listening – would she have names for them too?

      I’d never spoken to Ella even once. To be called anything at all was a prickling kind of honour, a drip of golden water. What a newt must feel dipping its toes in the river.

      Blunt-soft as a hot-tub jet, her coronet lungs and cardinal skirt gusts – bedwetter, she belled over the edge. A bolt of warmth pleated like weather between us.

      Meanwhile my real name, Robert, the eight compass points of polite distance, every woman in my kingdom-come blew in like fresh figments from the horizon.

      GLASS HOUSE

      Empty nester – my Kinder eggs hatched

       one by one into the thumb-tarnished world:

      an ex-wife, then peck marks of red-breasted predators,

      electronic footprints. No kids.

      So it’s lucky I loathe a vacuum –

       life at home is teeming.

      O census-takers of the five-to-nine,

       see how I slip through a cloud-glass pane

       and seal it like a wheel-and-deal,

       empty my pockets for the throb of red fruits

       in a hothouse of off-hours.

      Where my libido sends its sweet-pea runners up the walls,

       and by sundown even my plantar wart’s in flower.

      Tonight’s to-do of miracles

       under the clear big top:

      transmute self to pasture,

       turn the TV loose to graze.

      Let cross-breezes play my penny-flute holes,

      UFOs tortoise me in polka-dot code.

      While it sleeps, nip the lexicon’s wings.

      A personal ad lobbed like a rock into dusk

       gives edge to my pastoral sprawl:

      Looking for a top-dresser in a biplane,

      a Jeannie Epper pressure-hoser

       of pheromone fairy dust,

       glass-ceiling trasher

       a stem’s breadth from crack-and-burn.

      THE BODY SPECTACULAR: AN ATLAS FOR STUDENTS, 2ND ED.

       It isn’t I who peers at the draft of this atlas through beer goggles,

       inking it like a patient for quackery,

       but a stumbling double, dead ringer with a widget set

       of slashes, hyphens, dashes en and em mincemeating the margins, hinterlands.

      Exactly the kind of guy you wouldn’t want operating

      on you or heavy machinery,

       he skinny-dips his gloveless thumbs

       in the ebb and pulse of copy, stutters to the moat:

      This won’t hurt a bit.

      Meanwhile, languidly, with subtle difference, I

       illuminate the consonants of coccyx on diagrams of the female pelvis in my turret with the bird’s-eye view,

      just as Greta the Publicist, Dragoness-in-Chief,

       interrogates the hair on our neck of the woods:

       ‘Seeing anyone these days, Robert?’

      If I could split, I would – From the neck down, it’s all machine, claims a codger in a box on a dog-eared page. Siege ladder, I could footnote, brew a pot of black gold to the smoke point

      and sip, and drip on her slingback shoe,

       slug another gulp of my Hypocrite Oath:

       creosote, no sugar.

      THE SINGLE LIFE OF LAVA

      Glory me, she likes my _____.

      And even at this late age.

      Another one, she likes my _____,

       could come with