DANIEL BOURNE

Alligatoring:  A Love Song
	
             (Alligatoring: The patterned cracking in the surface 
              of a coat of paint, resembling the regular scales 
              of an alligator, the bane of painters of old houses 
              everywhere)

Windowsill, the fresh paint
talking with the old, an argument

none of them will win.   Better
to think of the alligator, the gingerly birds

that pick its teeth clean without resentment.
The grid and stigmata

on its back.

And if you would move out
then what? 

Grid and stigmata.

The one window of the year
when the animals can speak.  The pets

who did not manage 
to crawl up on the porch.   The ghosts 

whose bodies lay out in the garden, 
which is why you like to be out there.   

And if you would move out
then what?

So much to glimpse, the small 
infinities of squirrels, teeth of lions and grass 

mashed on its side
seen from the pitted surface of the moon. 
	
Like all painters to calculate the room for disaster
underneath the rainbow’s curve.   Like all romantics

to put our ear to the wall
and listen to our neighbors and their squeaking.

Alligator scale, gray
thicket of tangled alders, 

if you would move out
then what?—