I can’t read the small print in the scrapbook:
does this say, Relinquishing all bats, feeling faint
on the balcony? There is so much to be corrected here,
so many scribbles and grumbles, blind premonitions,
How does one interpret, on this late branch, the unexpected?

I can see just here that strength was gathering, perhaps
even an excess, and, specifically, the heart-rending detail
of the horseshoe found propped against the windowsill.
Years of toil to find the right angle, I’m almost rigid
with anticipation, maneuvering as at an opera intermission.

Stropping the razor, occasional whining, exploits of idleness—
all are clenched against a teatime eventuality, the progenitors
with their inspired plaintive skeletons engulf us here
for several pages, then sink, like migrating hooves.
What happened to them? I trusted their wings, their
heroic gusto methods. I am shaving this gossipy impetus

like rigid articles away from my face. I see the corrections
penciled in. I’m privy to their forgetfulness, a sprawling
design: I look away and project streaks of hesitant chance
wherever I look. Pulsating veins of thin planks to help me
bridge this muscular aria. Aslant the tone of Life’s dialogue,

between siestas, the horseshoe diversion is polished, its legs
degenerating, athletically anyway. It’s all in the ankle
or the wind, in breeding bones. Scrapbook, I am in the middle
of your hive. I must take back your corrections to the mute
and infirm stretches of my own big shave, swell the parallel
world with your murky burden, still betting against this charm

nailed to the sidedoor of a photograph to ward off, what was it,
was it me?