Poetry

We picnic by these bleached ruins
a few miles from the village
where we bought this rough
bread and cheese, this bottle

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’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.

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-

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

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

In the morning we found
40 acres of oaks
torn to the ground.

And for his human guests, imperial excess straining
all credulity: say a nightingale embalmed in honey
and stuffed in a swan […]

The Plat Book

cast our farm
and neighbors’
farms as flat […]