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.
orphan poems 