A Design and Purpose in Nature

Zero is a non-value and in love with human needs. The Mayans and the Arabs possessed it, wrapping it around their hearts like a sliced open tube. Zero was made into a fighter plane by Mitsubishi and used in World War II. It is the name of my right hand. My right hand is holding a crayon and has never knocked out any of my enemies though on occasion has wanted to. It clasps the crayon like a jaw clamped around a the scab of a mule. The mule makes a noise like a small mountain but doesn’t seem to be bothered much. Zero is skewed by fathoms and generations. Zero is an eyeball that sears.

*

Everyone missed one another’s point. A structure-lessness of argument. The un-neat world. A sharp blue mule kicks an old water bucket. This is not my face, the mule says to the puddle he has made. A cracked plate and a fork are in quest of a picnic table. Nobody around in sight. A fantasy without the fantasy. Clothes pulled off, numerous body shapes, paint. Elusiveness rules. I slide into the cooled epicenter then haul my body back up each day.

*

I was ten feet away from the urban mule-yard of the self. The hawk swooped down and almost took Jeff’s face off. He was in the Wendy’s parking lot eating a junior cheeseburger and the sun was slicing bits of trash from the asphalt. Nature makes itself apparent in the oddest of ways. It’s when we notice what’s around then suddenly. We can look and look and find nothing, or we can sit in a Dodge Neon in the sun eating a sandwich and something comes to us.

*

The splinters of a donkey’s hoof scatter the wind into spools of zeroes and trephynated heads. They are murmuring to each other, the splinters and the heads. They are slick, jagged, groping for the far reaches of the park.

James Grinwis is the author of The City From Nome (National Poetry Review Press) and Exhibit of Forking Paths (Coffee House/ National Poetry Series). He co-founded Bateau Press with Ashley Schaffer in ’06 (Now based with Dan Mahoney at College of the Atlantic), and has recent work in Bennington Review and Poetry Northwest. He lives in Greenfield, MA.