ERIC AMLING

Good Morning


Awoken to a candlelit continental breakfast
she sped on the freeway
with wet hair to the
government office.

The morning the color of tang
burning through the costume shop window
develops into a feeling
as an herbivore

winking in a grassy knoll
has no idea of the defeated accountant

with a cloister of digits
or the ripe bowl of plastic fruit
teasing me on the coffee table

in a northern rented townhouse.

The station wagon in the oak shade
has a history, once teetering on the edge
of a cliff and the family that was saved
by the fat child in the back seat

the morning gazette rendered a divine intervention,
which I can accept, myself feeling
like for two months a severed hand
was leading me by the collar.


Under the tutelage of a volcano
the world was made.

The dry tops of river stones shape the waters
of Richmond,

a cigar lector enjoys a Coke in a Cuban bar
coinciding with the Montana mines
radon gas relieving suffers of arthritis
and the Kentucky rain

that dribbles into the sheriff’s mug.



I haven't a point but the present,
gravity leaking into the dream realm
into the contradictory anatomy of a
library stricken with stunt-double card
cataloguers

the vision of a little boy in the future
wrestling with a practice hologram

or a trumpeter at a Civil War reenactment
killing a wasp with mourning songs
a week after I learned how to gamble
watching my grandmother at church bingo.

Who knows the results of throwing morals
in a centrifuge; the ectoplasmic ingredients
to make Hell out of prayers,

how I've become so overly sensitive
I can acknowledge the weight of a housefly
on a woman's dress.

What is it about nonsmokers' homes ridden
with ornamental ashtrays, the tact of Eisenhower
interstates, or an entire season of Quantum Leap
stacked in the den

but the convergence of for Life, or for Now,
minding the hum on the apex of a sugar cube,

the tonic webs deep in the galosh's toe

when twilight and dawn issue the state weather
and the community service kids at the library
guiding me to underachievement
had we not been taking note of the sound birds
amplify leaving wet asphalt, rationing a bottle
of Woolworth's chewable tablets

found in the overnight bag.


We brought the blimp into focus through stolen
binoculars the day of the parade

and from something that simple I began to gather
clues why I was put on earth.

Our arguments lacked stability, hearing the bugs
slam the attic window by the lamplight, pissing
in a crock pot

drawing the profile of presidential assassins
known by their three names
in the Saratoga guidebook, taking survey
whose daughter had the guts to be our woman

and the surfers in the half-pipe
and the love of cafeteria noise
and the fantasy bar mitzvah
and the shadows of smoke
and the rubber bands of her braces
and the hidden porn in the tool shed.

Some days it is a scene worthy to be put on
a government quarter.

Let us not talk of the state exam,
your thoughts on Japanese mind control
or the consecutive cancer that may destroy
my future wife
in the bronze August of perspiring doves
and narcoleptic pedigrees,
to never let these days end
soaring in an F-14 towards a constant setting sun
blank with the unapparent trust of tomorrow.