Nation-building Poem by Tim Lilburn

Pythagoras, sliced, freezered cat, defrocked Wal-Mart greeter, in anachoresis,

face welted with interior mountainings, mountain whippings, grinds ahead, dolphining,

dolphining,

in and out of the artifact cavitied humus of the Chukatcha Peninsula, a curly iron

basket of oily fire at the bulb of his forehead; he is stitching, you can imagine

a gold thread leaking and spinning braided from his testicles.

See him in the horsetail headdress of Appollo, a loaned snake cape, his look has the

gargly Cessna

roar of one moony engine leaving the continental shelf at night in snow, this is the

real one-father, bobbing in greasy light, then he

drops behind a meter high gravel ridge and night is there;

the Bering Sea rotates its nineteenth century gear

inside the drum of herony, idle volcanoes, toe-nail painting Las Vegased

dishy volcanoes

near which all the Pythagoreans sweat.

So you want to go home but haven't a clue.

Here's one, a ganglion.

Recall the ciliced, winded thigh will go by its own delectation

into the flint trench

That the whale bones must cover the corpse completely.

That the water creeping down in stones on this body is the sky bull

OK, now to go into the rolling mouth, take the stubbly, mud stairs

up to the surgery ward and through it, wiping gecko webs from the i.v. trees,

then into the broom closet that rustles with mammoth bones.

Now slide your soon-to-be-sliced thigh into the slate-sliding water,

go down in it, there is a promised house inside exactly the size of your head,

torso, legs, a book within a book, book written on the inside and on the outside,

a key shape outlined by a stitch of white stones on the intertidal plain.