Look at our faces – oh how dead we’re going to be!
--Mark Waldron

It’s the abundance of specificity that leaves me
so dying.

I go hotfoot through miserable woods that are haunted
by me, and here are the trees

each of whose leaves suggests its particular green.
I walk across a field

that’s been spattered with fragments of cow shit
every bit of which is specific.

I go to work. I go home. I go to work. Here are bones,
buttons. Here are wild dogs, biscuits,

French horns, imps, borlotti beans. Here is a submarine,
a brick, a rose hip.

Here are the piping bodies of girls and boys once popped
like perfect peas from puberty’s cramped pupa;

basted, they gleam head to toe with poem juice.
And here are all the world’s small stones arranged

in order of roughness with the smoothest on the right.