There was a time which, if you measured it on a wristwatch,
was the emptiness of a yawning mouth.

You see, seized up in cotton is a tough place to be,
or whatever paper is made of nowadays,
Materials of all varieties: mostly wood pulp,
sometimes fishing lines, or even more rarely
big gray bridges, open bays, hay lofts,
autumntime bales and wide indistinct fields.

My father has been irresolvable,
very had to figure. I used to think he did not emit,
but he emits well, only in a curious fashion, like to
a nitpicking butterfly, or a giraffe.
I did not think my father emits, until in an old cardboard box
he showed me his emissions, like confessions, under
a professor who could only have been incredibly fat;
I shrank in the chair and beheld lists of things.

Fallow acres
upon acres
upon acres fallow.