110. The Diner

the car

parked during the night

holds 

one corpse.

 

startled her 

half out of her skin

in the morning half light.

the door was unlocked.

 

across the long highway

is a phone tacked up

on a power pole

catching two hundred

miles of wind 

with its sharp corners.

sometimes the phone 

works.

 

thirty-two miles north

in town

the ringing

woke a sheriff.

 

by eight he was gone,

the corpse

leaving tire tracks

of the coronor’s rig.

 

all that’s left here

is the woman’s nerves

strung taut between sage.

all that’s left here

is the end of a man’s story

rolling across three ranches

like a tumbleweed.

109. Fieldwork

 

Walking across Wyoming

I fell for you, your curls

sweat plastered, your eyes

changing blue to green, your

flirting with waitresses while

I watched laughing for your shy

young hands hiding. I fell

longing for the touch 

of your brown hand brushing

my brown hand, my bleached

hair tangled in your mistaken 

fingers, exchanging Farka Toure

for Fugazi, breaking

my eardrums, my patience,

my grown wild heart.

 

Days are shrinking now, hit hard

by winds that parch, skinning

sun raw by desert sand

carried. At night I hear radio 

voices clattering between our tents,

restless and urgent. Walking, I see 

fire-cracked rock buried 

beneath sand, the way

our eyes plant explosives through

the unnamed senses. At night

you visit philosophy, torturing

breakfast and still …

 

Spain is one half-assed plan 

to work through winter, one

idea cooked up on a stormy day

of crackling lightning and a missed

tornado. Next, Cuba, but no one liked 

that, not even you knowing

about the whores and cuba libres

and hot sun, hot salt on skin.

Or Argentina has friends waiting,

long digs and pampas like home,

all in Spanish. If we both

rode an airplane to Patagonia

would you even hold my hand

shoo the Latinos from their lust?

Or would you indulge your own for me,

turned south and wild with hunger?

I fell for you like that hail

fell hard to earth last week.

Hug me, miss me.

108. Night Owl

 

One owl’s soft hoot eases out from the wood, and

leaves pause their evening flutter.

the last finch tucks down against a branch.

the only thing moving is that moon, slowly

slowly rising through velvety dusk.

Now we are all suspended together 

just above the ground of a world’s constant motion,

we are all suspended together in a holy 

state of waiting, 

waiting together, breath

shallow and slowed for absolute silence, 

absolute hope …

 

The faintest reply drifts in over treetops.

silver light smooth as stone and

no more than the smallest rustle

passed in dying undergrowth.

 

In one answering owl’s soft voice, 

night is released from its patient

pause, from such

absolute stillness, 

such hope.

107. my aunts

.

my aunts look like my

mother as they age, lovely

eyes and smiles that blow

all the fuses. their blood

pulses ancestral coal and tin, skin

slick with a ranch’s fresh

stench of branding: in this case

.

colts and

madness and

– oddly –

social justice a rich seam, shot through

the bedrock of calving and misogyny.

.

rage and shame, too, evenly laid,

thin but

persistent lodes snaking

through each sister.

.

how alive two are yet, how 

men stunted them all,

the girls. 

now they fade.

they stare out across dry lawns,

all the colts broken

.

and we cousins sigh,

softly and half lost like the ranch

left fallow for our

winter.

106. war dead

.

today i found your phone

message and one envelope

that you had sent to

me last year before 

you became just one more dead 

man that I know. 

.

you had sent a photo

that i saved and i won’t hold it 

against my heart 

.

or against you –

.

i for one know the cost of no

interior rest and 

i’d not have lasted

as long, whiskey and gun as

backboard or not.

.

well i did save it 

just not as a sacrament.

more like a scar that

can still raise a smile.

it’s there in a flat tin, now

second drawer down

.

where the accidents

are filed. Let’s assume you could

not have saved yourself

.

since no one else could

save you. Let’s assume 

you’re now comfortable,

warm

loved.

.

105. long memory

.

just under the prairie

grass are my people, dry and

quiet now, dreaming up

.

all the buffalo 

hoofprints of ancestors

long slaughtered.

.

just under the grasses are my

own handprints set in the stone

heart of earth, well buried.

.

this pale body … so different

now only the clouds might

recognize me. 

only the 

clouds might remember me

and they don’t sing out. 

.

103. drought

.

those clouds were

smeared hard on the sky, dug in 

to the blues like bruised

.

implants and yet it did

not rain on my house. 

it did not rain again, clouds

.

hoarding their moisture

as if punishing my small 

swath of desert for

.

some muttered insult

that I never did

voice aloud – never –

.

even if I thought it

just briefly in secret, days 

ago out of passing

.

disgust, frustration –

surely understandable:

the clouds had sailed on past.

.

the clouds keep sailing

right on past:

​rabbits longing,

​​deer parched, 

trees gasping.

.

102. that rabbit

.

after two months silence

one rabbit ran wildly through

the headlight’s pool, crazed

.

by the thrill of light

against dark winter days, crazed

by the sound of my 

.

truck after months of 

soft skitters, just 

dry branches clicking.

.

I’ve missed the raucous

presence of animals, wild

and separately

.

alive outside of my

cluttered hands’ obsession 

to control: one 

.

reminder that i

remain small to the world,

yet present.

.

which i

believe promises that we could

meet again. 

why not.

101. in my dreams

.

last night i picked up

the phone but you were still dead.

you keep calling me

.

though it’s hard to hear

your words this way, hard to trade

old photos of our

.

heroes, your new collage,

my aimlessly wandering  

with found objects and

.

tribal members. your

brother is angry and P 

is angry with me

.

which is easier. 

i’m fine. i’ve seen your face on

strangers in philly

.

and once in DC … you

winked at me, no less – nice touch

and every time

.

i inscribe three dots

on the bottom of a clay 

pot i smile for you 

.

now untouchable.

it’s always nice to hear from 

you. it’s just hard to

.

understand over this phone.

i’ve reserved a place for you 

in my dreams tonight.