Poetry

On nights when you can’t sleep
I think you open the doo
to the sky

Coming home with the last load I ride standing
on the tongue of the trailer, behind the tractor
in its hot exhaust, lank with sweat

Do you hear       as if
in a far away room
down a narrow hall
in another part of the hotel

This black sedan lies on its top
on the kitchen window sill, its wheels
in the air, its battery drained,
the oil trickling into the cylinders.

It was not death we came to fear but her life,
her other birth, waking remade from the womb

of that disease. One leg was withered, a dragging-

It’s the gray of canning season rain,
neither cool nor warm, and mottled
with feeble light.

The pang and clangor of pitch-dense wood
in the stove and the odd, almost syncopated
pops of studs, joists, and rafters as they warm […]

In the alluvium of
the hot afternoon,
where the day’s clarities […]

At the lower fence line under the stars
he hears what at first he takes
to be the neighbor’s mare come
to investigate his apple pocket […]

Ruin

was rumored

to be rooming

up the road
where

a neighbor’s barn’d
burned down.