Fox's Dream of the Log Flume

Provisionally 'I' practically alive

Mistook signs for signified

And so since I’ve often tried

To run them off a cliff like Gadarene swine

and tied my thought-ropes in anchor bends

wondering whether we were someone better then,

or maybe just better able to pretend

(and what better means to our inevitable end!)

No, I don't know if I know

though some, with certainty insist

'no certainty exists'

well I'm certain enough of this:

in the past 14 years, there's only one girl I've kissed

In the blistering heat of the Asbury pier

we sat quiet as monks on the Ferris wheel

Until looking down at the waltzer

and out at the sea

I asked her, "did it ever have that recurring fantasy

where you push little kids

from the tops of the ride?"

she shook her head no

I said "oh, neither do I"

and with my grandmother's ring

I went down on one knee

and the subsequent catastrophe

has since haunted me

like a fiberglass ghost in the attic

my inconveniently selective memory

as provisionally 'You' mercifully withdrew

all the bearing points we thought we knew

Day's run, days set plot

our compass shot

we sailed waywardly on

singing out midnight archer songs

until well past dawn

it's still dark in the deck of our boat

haphazardly blown broken bows

our aimless arrow-words

don't mean a thing

so by now I think

it's pretty obvious that there's no God

and there's definitely a God!

I dreamt of the rocks at the Asbury dunes,

and that you jumped from the top

of the Log Flume,

and they gather like wolves

on the boardwalk below

and they're howling for answers

no wolf can know

I charged at the waves

With a glass in my hand

I was tossed like a ball

at the bottle stand

and I landed beside your

remains on the stones

where you cold fingers

wrapped around my ankle bone

while maybe ten feet away was a star

thousands of times the size of our sun

exploding like the tiny balloons

you'd throw darts at

I slept until our chest was full

of yarn we spun from Shetland wool

in socks from where the Dorset grows

sheared and scoured hours before

the rooster crows

the price of German silver fell

threw this disused thalers

down the superstition well