He walks ahead
of the man. His
chain drags on the ground,
clanking a song of dark colors
in the acid air. He
knows where he’s going;
echoing blood cells
in the man’s head,
his imagination a quail
among dirty words.
They Say in Yellow Jacket
The mind’s anchored to a stone.
Dandelion wine grows bittersweet
in the musty cellars. The old
beat-up Buick’s a buffalo,
drinking cries of coyotes
as it stumbles toward a beginning.
The land eats itself, a half-mile
into the heart. Sage blooms in the heads
of Billy the Kid & Jesse James.
I hope the road hurries to Denver.
Here, even the gully-brown jackrabbit
gets a dirty deal. Buntings lay low
among the rocks where tumbleweed
stakes claim. Any moment the sky
could leap open as the body
settles into itself like a stone
tossed into a lake. You’re safe
with knives & Front Range daybreak.
I’m spellbound by the mountains,
a woman dropping her last veil.
When Men Can’t Trust Hands with Wood
You can pull off back roads
astonished with honeysuckle
& Virginia rails in marsh grass.
In Oven Fork, they know how to witch
for water deep as stars underground.
Here, rough men know how
to handle iron & die hard
in blue vaults of racial memory.
Under villanelles of pleated dresses
women forget flesh. In Black Mountain
Coleman headlanterns tunnel through
the mole’s tombed season.
Birthday Song
The sharecropper’s wife
stands in unharvested
stillness. Her womb
turned inside out by God’s
grief. She kneels beside
a newly-dug bodyhole,
& her man hands her
the black handkerchief.
Legacy
Suck dove meat from the bones,
tallyho around the electric fence
of this guardhouse.
Pin medals to chests. Our shadows
sleep in the ground, old combat boots
laced on the feet of the dead.
For as long as I can remember
men have sewn their tongues
to the roofs of their mouths.
Eye Witness
I want to forget everything.
I want to pull the venetian blinds
& extinguish the lights. Sometimes
six high-stepping boots
emerge from the sumac thicket
toward this unlit house. Six
black boots kick at my front door
till a vase of periwinkles overturns
& rolls under the bed.
A spray of glass covers
the middle of next year.
A hunting knife arcs the air.
I’m a smashed violin covered with dust,
& rise to drip red leaves down streets.
Unnatural Deaths
Foster child of ragweed,
can you hear grain
silos opening in the night?
Where the sun’s a dirt farmer’s
good-luck timepiece,
yucca drips white
& the afternoon forecasts
irony. Dust-bowl
people disappear walking
toward rain, in August
thickets of magenta thistle.
When you enter the town
voices of children will stone you
till your clothes are rags.
Mr. Ditch Commissioner
of La Acequia Del Llano,
did you know a gopher hole
can swallow a man?
A Different Story
Teenyboppers crowd No Exit.
Lep Zeppelin & illegal
shadows. I hate words
burning twist lemon menthol 100s.
No, nothing I say can stop them
from splitting themselves open
like those honeydew melons
I saw last summer
driving the midwest.
They clap hands & laugh
like Sam River’s sax,
dancing the rose’s perfect vernacular
as they push their lives into streets
on the tongues of men.
One-Breath Song
you are the third term
carried to the fourth power of numbers
two steps overlooked inbetween
colors of night-burning sky
a priori light blue of your dress
our faces everything except
against odds of self-discovery
we find our bodies locked
together in a room of breath
threefold at the rotting threshold
divided into ontogenetic questions
a fluke of radio waves in the storm
the song that uses up our lives.
Frontal Lobe Postscript