None of Them Would Stop
       

Laughing, the sudden taxidermies
leaving the field a mixture
of recent animals, inanimates,
and I'd raise laughers there,
if I could locate them, each in a cherry
picker, and the children would walk
through with marbles like eyeballs
in their pockets and ask someone
to hold their hands for small fears
of the animals left there so lifelike
and still, and I only hear laughter
coming from no identifiable source,
possibly off-camera, and I'm not being clear
about the sky which is still shaped
like your face, no, the sky is still.

Copyright © 2009 Daniel Coudriet All rights reserved
from Say Sand
Carnegie Mellon University Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission