DANIEL BOURNE

Power Strip, Artist’s Colony, Johnson, Vermont

Two eyes and a mouth, holes
take the offered plug, no landscape

for them, green hill, romantic bridge,

the woolen mill with its woolens,
the art studio with its art.

Nearby the trash bin circles
its own set of problems

that even plastic linings cannot fix, childhood wad
of rejection and form. The black cat by the river

that loves the cedar waxwings.
The two spots on their feathers

like pink orifices of fish.
Those stupid poets in the windows—

Saying black cat, black cat, plug into me
your desire for the things you can’t have