Poetry

      The sun rises late in this Southern county. And, since the first thing I do when I wake up is go out into the world, I walk here along a dark road. There are many trees. Also, shrubs and vines—sumac, the ivies, honeysuckle.

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

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.

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.

Ruin

was rumored

to be rooming

up the road
where

a neighbor’s barn’d
burned down.

The forecast had not predicted it,
and its beginning, a calming, rumbled dusk

and pleasant lightning, she welcomed as harbinger

With a squeal, the already
otherworldly broadcast
stuttered,
scattered,
leaving
only a tattered hiss.

In the patient, quiet museum, she is exhibited
closed, indehiscent inside a glass casket,

reclining on her back, on hair long as her spine.