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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

 
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Cooperman 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