I am collecting insects
from the ground
before the water table
turns on us again.
I am breathing in
the bread of the living,
though my little ghosts
are in tune with what I take.
Let me not deceive you,
first flowers of sacrilege:
I won’t go bawling
from the labyrinth,
my rashes and sores
handled wrongly.
The physician may rest
in his mountain.
The wefts and warps
of the globe may rest.
My love with her tongue
at the tip of the truncheon.
Me with my tongue
asleep at her hipbone.
A field of horses
disperse before
the reveling places
for monsters.
Let the beleaguered
return to their safes.
Let the dying
be returned to the sea.
Our failed hobbies burnt
in the rites of idiots.
Our carted rubble sits
in its fine anterior rage.

*

Peter Mishler was educated at Emerson College and Syracuse University.  He is employed as a public school Creative Writing teacher.  He has been working on text and image installations in the city of Syracuse with the photographer Joe Lingeman.  Other new poems are forthcoming in the 2013 Best New Poets anthology and The Literary Review online.