Tie us together
a clatter of soup cans
to the tailpipe of your brusque
and censored sentences
and drag us out of the city.
We clap out a reveille and sing
against each other
against the braise of the road,
like we are a constant twenty-one
gun salute praising prairie
grass, dogs, and fire.
We fall by the wayside
off the one-lane highway
between town names and oil pumps
you pretend are the skyline of Paris in the dark.
In the red knot
of the one living tree for miles
you use that cheap-o pocket knife
they gave you back in Scouts
and carve initials, a heart pierced.
You work as if you are tattooing
a flesh, a place, with a moment in time.
I lean up against that lesion
Even as it drools
heart blood in my hair.
You say: your life for a memory.
Threaten me with the blade
of the liver-spot stranger
with the terrifying
bone-faced marionettes
he dances like miniature children
lurching, flaky zombies
moonwalking just above the sidewalk.
Your own smallness forced
you to hulk like a Kodiak
when he rubbed his hand on your arm.
Wouldn’t stop.
The weary wary ever since.
A jaundiced eye watches pulp films,
op-eds, obits and ducks
from the handsy universe
that strokes every hair on every head.
A memory. You tilt. You pivot. You gleam.
I can calculate your area, your mass. Your hot
breath, your animus, the sound of your
sole crushing the dry leaves,
every step an end stop
To some brave, welled up thought.
For a minute, you don’t look like anyone I know.
I would like to remember anything.
But mostly, I would like to remember
A plane crash.
Falling agape, headlong, limbs akimbo
Into a farmer’s field newly famous.
Crawling through red-soaked glass
To a future now clarified by
The thrill of death.
Or if not,
at least counter the massive criticals
with words: Scheherazade’s harem pants,
Lies that pass gracefully through
the gap ‘twixt my teeth.
Some nice thing.
But we know the lives we know.
We are familiar in our brands,
our hearts, our soup cans.
The hand of the sun pulls back
her hemlines and reveals little
towns and water towers, little
Plattes and not the Seine.
Bark and beetle in my hair,
I begin with the hour in which we met.
