Clean Up

The way the forest sounds
sneak into the grocery store
the shopping cart creaks
like mountains
I have seen mountain goats
scale Campbell’s soup cans
as if they were butter (aisle 12)

Through those aisles we move
in murmurations
enacting strange Pac-Man patterns
of consumption, holding coupons
up against the ghostly creep
the spilt cherries that
magically disappear, the floor unstained

The way the vitamin stacks whisper hypnotically
the freezers murmur anonymously
while these persistent birds overhead
click and chirp like cameras
only ever keep
one eye on you, the other eye
sees through the security guard
to the nightless blue sky of the neon sign

I think I will root for truffles tonight
I am no hero, I am skinny dipping
in a sea of potato chips
swaying like kelp past cookies and creosote cleaner
peanut butter tubs you could bathe in

When the elephants come back to Canada
we will hear their thunderous stomp
on the roofs of stores like these
stuff our shirts with water bottles
strap Quebecois cheeses to our thin chests
praise the lake waters come rushing in

Their trunks will come crashing through
grasping their ablation
collecting us or the shopping carts
or the salmonella that have miraculously
returned to these waters

The mountain goats, though, stay prophetically
dry climb or rather float
up those coarse highways
tablets returning to the mount
over drifting ice cream, soy milk bars,
and burning High Times
This is how we will all die,
knowing that only our vitamin dreams
will survive