Daniel Bosch

Bunch of Asparagus and Asparagus
October 13, 2013 Bosch Daniel

 Bunch of Asparagus and Asparagus

                Edouard Manet, oil on two canvases, 1880

   

1

Bundle on a wet bed

of greens or chives

on a marble table

in the kitchen of the Hotel

Intercontinental

 

Sheaf bound by a seaweed thong,

Sebastian’s strategic arms, pinioned,

his interdigitated sins laced behind

with salt and mulch, manure and leaf clippings

 

Scrolls on new vellum or belted ammo—

blind, etiolate rounds from deep in the magazine

 

Ballistic missiles built to slake May Day, May Day,

asleep under olive drab mosquito nets,

solemn at anniversary parades, Kremlin onions

gleaming above each cortege and its oblate flatbeds,

chromium hydraulic lifts winking with each erection

 

SS-20s, SS-18s, multiple independently-targetable

reentry vehicles, Titans, Minutemen, Peacekeepers

on eighteen-wheeled caissons, diesel engines snoring,

redundant tires churning redundant grit:

Nevada, Utah, Kamchatka

 

Perfect answers, mutually arrived at

in the comfort of question-deep silos,

dandled by spread eagles’ talons

 

Arrow

shafts

 

Furled

parasols

 

2

Flaccid love note, dead toenail,

warhead in winter camo

 

A wet bed, and we cannot abide

the scent of our own urine

Daniel Bosch’s most recent book of poetry is Crucible. Recent poems, translations, essays, and book reviews have appeared in The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, The Cortland Review, B O D Y, The Offending Adam, and Berfrois, where he is Senior Editor.