Lie flat on your back for ten days, kudzu
starts at your feet, devours you.

We have our own mythology. Gods in the South small enough
to fit into a soda bottle. Smaller than the atom.

Smaller than the freckles in your eye.
Smaller than the nubs of your teeth.

Small enough to shed your skin for skin of damned dogs.
Of snakes. To be lifted off a ladder in a backyard wrestling pit,

crashing to the earth, wings fused into your body. The mythology
of a broken body means no shit work for a while.

Means a check for every month,
cash straight into your body like

oxygen sucked from broken marrow.
Tell us again the story of the trailer bride, who turned into a cicada.

Screamed her tiny wings together as her husband removed
antlers from a buck. Played dirges on his saw, each note bent,

breaking timbres against the animal’s warm body.
Tell us the story of the young hicks who were copping,

and found their way into the backwoods.
And the mountains begged to be put back together.

And the shit jobs never returned, and the hicks never got straight.
The bride with her breast placed to her child’s lips, tell me how a howl

becomes a dumbing, endless hum, how a child can grow a silver crown,
head shaved the next morning,

flakes of silver petals thick enough for feet to disappear,
thick enough for sprouted wings to fan patterns on a pleated linoleum floor.

A bruise on the face slowly heals. A split lip has time to be sewn shut. Your wings itch like phantom
limbs from a phantom body.

Snow melts

and the ensuing river begins            to wear down the mountain 

         drop by infinitesimal drop—            a process of hollowing.

                        *

Nobody recognizes his own unbecoming, so the slow green slope of us 

                    slopes slowly into blue.

                         *

They say it takes full centuries to erode a body
                                                completely. 

I’m not so sure. I was once a single misplaced word that extinguished a family forever.

                        *

Stone must be easier            to revisit                        with hindsight, 

                                      to love                           more in its absence. 

Stone must be easier to forgive.

                        *

One day we’ll all have to travel a thousand miles and back 

in a car too small for its family — over stone and sand — 

just to stand awe-struck on the lip of some empty canyon 

carved from a mountain by a dried out river.

The finite                    enormity of it. 

           Everything                   reawoken                   by the absence of anything.

 
For once I can leave the grass unclaimed, sink into green and unmake
each cloud from my image. 

The mountain painfully small above                  pins a star on my chest. 

                                 Even now, you have never been here. 

And between spasms of light a tree loses its oakness. In undefined shadow I lose
only the skin of us. 

Waiting in my ear                   the thunder behind silence,

 
          in the hollow of my ear                       becoming silent.

Lookie here, it’s not every day
that the sand kisses your lips.

Purple sweet potatoes melt
in the basket. Lord, it rains,

but not where we need it.
The sweetest fruit on earth

hides on the cliff ’s furthest edge,
away from our prickly hands.

Its name is Zeus Juice I feel you,
I feel you, I feel you.

How short is the list? Move
to New Orleans and change

the scenery; shoot a deer
in the dome and dance

to the synthesizer: hips and ass
and hips and ass, but

mostly stiff arms and sadness.
So much of the bouncing ball

is about what it is not.
Be thankful you’re not a bee

because you’d quickly be a dying breed.
I could suck nectar from your neck,

but I’m not going to. For now.
What I would give to have it back—

the time we danced together
in the thick of our own dust.

Two deer in the Detroit airport. One I could understand. They seized up like trophies when children ran toward them near the car rental kiosk. A bearded man tried to corner them against a wall of glass. I was holding my mother’s duffel filled with my clothes, rising on the escalator. There was the clicking of hooves against the marble floor, and I thought, I will never feel as strange as this.

I used to play a game where I imagined everyone around me had just lost both their parents in an accident. Six weeks since my mother’s passing, her last breath drawn during a nap between episodes of Guiding Light, and I couldn’t imagine the people sitting next to me on the plane headed anywhere other than their parents’ homes. There was the sudden cut of a laugh track from the television that night as I reached to dial an emergency line, my vision blurring, my chest warming with nausea.

When I get out of the taxi in Bermuda, I avoid my reflection in the revolving glass of the hotel door. It is night, and my bags seem heavier. I rise on the elevator and arrive at the wrong floor. I step out anyway. There is a beep, light and high, and the metal doors shut behind me.