Beauty is the joke at the gallows.
Look at all this golden grass against
the sky, tattered clouds. Look at all
the water, hills in wrinkled linen.
And the spine begins to laugh the center
of soot. Look at the sheen beneath the cliff,
the cliff inside it, the swallows cutting
air in rainbow strips. I wave hands above me,
likely to lift to the flight of swallows,
their blue, precise tails like wood chisels.
Beauty makes a crack at the funeral.
Magpie falls from cottonwoods, inking
calligraphic letters, the dead guy’s middle name,
landing on a fence post, the barbed wire
ringing minor key. Beauty punches the dumb boy,
in the nose nods tiny flowers everyone ignores
until they trip, come face to face with an aster—
oh stars against me, so soft lavender.
Disaster is a heckler behind the blind
comedian, shut down with quick retort, the stars
don’t give a damn about you, simian mouther,
plankton, albatross of the flea. Beauty proceeds
to dip the sun in pink and lower it over
the farmhouse, the bottom road, cow sounds,

birds, tractor humming, the broken field. Beauty collects
the paycheck from the entrepreneur with the stolen cigar,
gets into the broke-down jalopy and drives on.

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