Getting Vintage

Getting Vintage

It’s all alchemy, isn’t it, trussed

like oven birds to be delivered

into the kiln the crucible the still

whatever hot oven will bake or

boil or steam everything we ever

                                                taste/see

                                                sniff/listen

forgetting something?  

the bake of it with herbes de Provence

mash of it with sugar until

the steam through the copper

tubing converts it into a few

of booze for special use only

please ink the green

bottle, keep it out

of the sun
light, let the basement

spiders                 step/lift

                                step/lift

all their eight leg tips along

the hips of this or that glass

body while we wait on our own

making, while our days

take us through our noons through our

dreaming and all that goes

nights to steam through that tubing

remember all that

tubing
to be reduced      drop/

                      drop

                                                drop/

                                       drop

raw into the honest sepulcher –
be --

and this is of the utmost

cruciality:
– be

a god paused a quiet god paused

while the drops drop

or better be

                                                brass/glass

                                                 cask/glass

and suffer

suffer the fill to the fill line

suffer the gag plunge cork bung

suffer above all that shelf of dark

suffer waiting

suffer waiting – making

what you made

                                vintage with a year

                                every auctioneer will breathe under

                                their breath, like mystery

                                like you, barely

                                                                (but for the brave few)

                                exhumed, slip easy as grease

                                between the fingers of the flummoxed butler

                                all of you shards and self

                                all of you splashed and spattered

                                                while the cork in the neck is still wet

                                                and unslipped.