On the rush home
I wait out the sun.
The staircase in the weeds,
The vacant windows warping,
Over a long rainy week
Someone cut out their hearts
With a coping saw.
Nothing lives
Honest and plain.
Your mother saw the stars
And almost fell on her head
In a car of a friend
On the night of your birth.
I wonder why our lives crossed
Through an opening door.
Poison oak crowds the ruts of the county streets.
Ground hogs dig under the fences and
Forage in the landfill.
Walking the dog I see them
In their tunnels
Their mooneyes watching.
Gouging the hard molded rubber bark
They spill my trash and stand
On their hind legs,
Their wet snouts raised.
This autumn I have become shapeless
Almost treeless and bare.
On the thick roads where my blood runs
Where my mind loses a thousand cells
There is a direction to my forgetful life.
On the stem of a fish head island
In the pines I once walked
Finding a steel fence
Backed up against a highway
I held up to the end of a time and place.
Far beyond the island
The trees turn on the earth’s frost
The roads converge.
Once I walked the fence to the end,
A factory lot on the county line,
Climbed over
And found my way home in the dark.