Clade Song 2

Corpulent Vow

The color of meat the color of insides

At night what stolen virtue and what cups

To find a nation personally unfit

I was a salesman a yes man a tractable man

In all acres and spheres a body correspondent

Matching the drapes to the ties each night

A stolen virtue and a borrowed car

Gathering cells to their utmost thoughts

What sugars are to doughnuts laving the hole

The hole at last and encumbrance shed

Where butchers and bakers and bankers and cows

I was a salesman primed to grade a choice

I was thirsty in the fluid trades

Thoroughly versed in vascular suits

To trim the sale and blush compassion

Hard candy times at the animal scale

Where vessels singe in the millennial fire

Libra to try and balance the loss

I am amber and housefly and agar saints

A plaint of number and corpses and dye

Being Glad

Matthew Cooperman is the author of Still: of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move (Counterpath Press, 2011), DaZE (Salt Publishing Ltd, 2006) and A Sacrificial Zinc (Pleiades/LSU, 2001), winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize, as well as three chapbooks, Still: (to be) Perpetual (dove | tail, 2007), Words About James (phylum press, 2005) and Surge (Kent State University Press, 1999). A founding editor of Quarter After Eight, and current poetry editor of Colorado Review, he teaches at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, where he lives with the poet Aby Kaupang and his two children. More information can be found at www.matthewcooperman.com