Bridges and streets. The neon like candy.
Brake lights blooming in rain. Rain.
Concrete. Long live the concrete of cities.
Spoon. Chair. Bed, bread, and stitch.
This language of the house. Blond
light across the mirror. Soap. Salt shaker.
The ginger of you. The cream of you.
The eyes and bones. The scratch-and-sniff
of you. The back. The back of the hand.
Crickets and prairie. The trees standing
like husbands. The gold grass moving,
the pelt of earth. The fence-posts like souls.
Lunch at midnight, dinner at breakfast,
graveyard and swing. Machine that
is the father’s pet. Machine that is days.
Breath, reed. Vowels, syllables. Strings.
The bluesman saying, I don’t practice,
I throw some meat into the guitar case.
Moon that is the sun of statues. Cornice
pigeons, accordion storefront gates, trash
swirled into cowlick shapes. Box sleepers.
The wish, biding inside like a hive of bees.
The crow, a knuckle of the landscape.
The stone, which is tired of the discursive.
This poem originally ran in the May 26, 2011, issue of the magazine.