Poetry

On nights when you can’t sleep
I think you open the doo
to the sky

Do you hear       as if
in a far away room
down a narrow hall
in another part of the hotel

Coming home with the last load I ride standing
on the tongue of the trailer, behind the tractor
in its hot exhaust, lank with sweat

It’s the gray of canning season rain,
neither cool nor warm, and mottled
with feeble light.

This black sedan lies on its top
on the kitchen window sill, its wheels
in the air, its battery drained,
the oil trickling into the cylinders.

It was not death we came to fear but her life,
her other birth, waking remade from the womb

of that disease. One leg was withered, a dragging-

The Plat Book

cast our farm
and neighbors’
farms as flat […]

We dug potatoes from their cabinets of soil, watched
the belly of the earth turn over in its grave, a glimpse of flesh
through darkening ground, roots and greenlings—then the plow.

The pang and clangor of pitch-dense wood
in the stove and the odd, almost syncopated
pops of studs, joists, and rafters as they warm […]

In the alluvium of
the hot afternoon,
where the day’s clarities […]