For Coyotes:
I shine the flashlight to the doe’s tugged-away lungs
Inside the barrel of the gun Gram sings
a voice lost catching
What we live on: family recipes
& these remains:
A Scavenger Song
Mangled, tossed off the narrow Rulo bridge O!
My man’s friends strip cars for their parts so What you give me
it Ain’t nothing to them: You got to go somewhere
To Get Somewhere: I Sing the Earth
in Turn
I cannot chance the rites crucial to scavengers
like us old prairie women bleeding: Eat whatever don’t eat
you first
Where I hold the thin tube of light into body Girl
To See How We Live Inside
That tree of lung voiced in prayers But where
my arm’s been bumping his it’s an old Arm:
& warm as the first liquid bullet:
CoyotesGrateful for any blood
in the dark now
Mother took the loaf of bread from the warm oven
& I reached for her love like a round disk of light
keeping warm even after it became a ritual:
The convention of true & how it can’t be: Gram singing
bringing this loaf to our table What is the body
but this meal inside meal Air all bullet & charged
between us: me with that gun’s voice shrillingAs he come in:
We rock when we sing All the way to Cheyenne,
to ourselvesto Cheyenne, Wyoming
Wyoming, Montana
Where a river calls beneath gurgling & dead the wide wide blue,
All the way to anywheres butgone
Whatever fills the hole My mother said when I ate that meat & bread
When I took that man in off the Prairie Told him: Go hunt us up some earth
So is light a bullet here for the child I once was?
Howling into its blare?
Listen, what fills the hole ain’t like a car stereo we listen to in the dark
They caught her singing & she spent the rest of her life in that chair
You might have missed it, Brother, that song:
All the way to Cheyenne
The dumping of a body unceremonious before I get the doe’s ghost
The truck over roads back: my wrist weak to hold
that gloss of silver skin I’m twining for around his neck
he touches me again
But what we live with: This begging bridge
its own wishes
Why call the eaters so close?
Where did the song of air go?
And what we risk:
Those boys look at me like crazy when I sing it all the way back
When I glow from the insidehaving swallowed the deep string
in Rulo
I heard for a moment
That wailing
air passing through
the bridge (of an old woman’s voice
like headlights on a dark road
marking the way out:
CONVERSATIONS WITH THE ENGAGEMENT RING
Sentry of gravity, gold in your padded box. Won’t rust
When storms come? Listen, what carries us into the next life
Isn’t riches, it’s dumb: Dog patience, gnawing in the yard:
He offered me his bones, his children, his name. Offered
My finger to penetrate your round & petulant eye,
But nothing convinces me to die, having earned my first
Death early: He refused this reservation. Unbetrothed
Pedestrian on a corner haunting: His father explained wanting
Only two kinds of women live under the sky. Guard the first.
Letting the others go to rot. (Thus missed my true countenance
How deep the knot, the blood, the roots of tree.) He wept:
Won’t she make a regular of me? We anticipate storms & trust.
But we rust. We rust. In time even bones go to dust.
No matter how wide the heart. Buffalo end. Elephants killed
For tusk. At the cusp of each evening the moon comes up.
Whales, feeding too long, get trapped in ice. It’s harder than
That to love. Don’t ask twice. Slower & rooted, a heliotrope
Sings toward sun. So she loved me. Yes, she loved me
With my bonnet undone. Old glittered trickster, petty loot-
Grist, You must have known that it would come to this:
Collecting every inch: Radius, femur, flat saucers of knee.
I’ll own every thing of him. But no one eyes me.
CONVERSATIONS WITH THE DARKNESS
A man to come out with his hunger, his gun. Discount
Our emptyish wallets & dully perforate our keep: Let it
Be done. His face hid in your bosom but I wanted to see.
I wanted angles, too. Every thief belongs to someone &
She loves his details more than you. The palm stroked
A forehead, the bridge of that forgotten nose in war or
Vain. You were beneath the sheet, as well, but I could
Not fathom one stain. O lost street! This belonging to
A life. A fence. The tearing of my dress the sound of so
Many pigeons uprooting at once from their perch. Flock
Of sky. Never our day yet waiting to die, gasping greedy
In your self-same caress. Your black press on our shock.
We lay in our berth. Voice on the radio but all songs are
Shrouds. You rest behind each button & portrait. Ear
Canals & crease of wrist. Children for oil & in defense:
Youth misspent between blades of grass deep in the earth.
Forgotten milkmaid, sunlit farms & sweet radical hay.
The afternoon barns. Split zero, Nevada given to clouds.
You regret to inform. Regret to undo. Statue of a dream
Paved in gold that wore through. The crags of the mines.
O the canaries sing. The shopkeeper signs. The blossom
of you growing full inside. Our country at war & we’re
On the other list. Still awake at this hour. Complicit &
denied. We’ve spoken all the words we have. Against you
Tried & taken each away. We’re trembling. We’re sorry.
We’ll do anything. Long as we don’t have to sing. To say.
