Yellow Madness

 

 

Blanched grass is beaten down flat. I hose it

and hope to resurrect it, like the floor

that bubbled up when my father tried to

break a heavy dish against its

soft and waxy linoleum.

 

A welt grew in all of us, only temporary,

to be rubbed numb and mostly forgotten.

And there sprouted a pattern, a thing that

killed the good-enough of life itself with

its thick tumors visible.

 

Forget about seamlessness.

 

Anger cooks up and my mother sets it

at my father’s place. Steam gathers up

and drips back like stalagmites.

 

Death is warming over

 

in the bright eyes and fresh livers, in the

thirsty in the virtuous in the guilty.

The sick yellow thick of it is there, in the

 jaundiced and madness and the marigold.

In the amber-liquid nightmare.

 

The yellow glazing

over and waxing

hard silent cymbal goes crashing.