Closet Vision

Holed up behind the whitewashed wooden slats slung like ribs above the greed-begotten candy plaster- papered noworlaters, holed up and far from witches in the woods’ evergreen fringe, horse chestnut brews, parents’ crow commotion or robin squabble haranguing the fat wide open always out there, I read for hours on the red shag rug hearing market cry and grave slope, catching the men through ages of flint and full haggle in my 2 by 6 chamber, heart bent on Blue Beard, the dead wives’ skeletons cantilevered to a door hook. Later, hunkering down with amputee hangers, catalogs, the bottle stash and jug wines, Jim Beams too hiding with air, no air, plus a stolen Joy of Sex circa 1974, its pell mell positions and crouching women, with the POV going scrap and rattle, some theater of being a little less bright. Thought I saw one night the million paired eyes swinging upward, the hand me down generations spelunking in holes, fine lineaments braved by way of cream curd and lust and dictatorial DNA, felt through overhead squib and carpet warp, some full squat before the slate rock hearths, more buried in strata of granites, igneous, limestone, ash, the mind’s eye leveled to one rectangle of light around the animal who wants to know that it knows and say so, lumbering down the long path, vanishing.