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
