Placing your foot in a bucket of darkness,
three miles to home: ostrich farm, oat field
pimpled with buttonweed, Rayleigh Scattering dissolved
by mist above. Two hours you spent rivering
a womb-humid artery for floodwater to pass through
& now passage back through steamy membrane of June.
Language between a mother & father on a lit porch
densely sways like a horse bowing but not grazing.
You pass, imagine them saying, “Night is a combine
& we sit like field stones waiting to be scooped up,
rimracking the whole machine.” Anything can be transmitted
over this open frequency, poem, grocery list, prayer, divorce.
She might confess, “Jeffery, I love myself,
yet when it is my turn to speak, I have nothing to say.”
In a glade scoured clean of light, the span moon makes
can be covered over by a fingernail; a hornet’s nest’s worth
of cold in the lungs would be worth all the Seyfert
Galaxy. Past the house, coffin-long trajectories
of spit precede unsure footing. You whisper
your earliest memory of song which held no rhythm,
no harmony, only waverings of voice-litany of sweat
& sawfly, ditch of ragweed you seem to be sinking in to.
Only dark & those restless, unfractured sounds tensing night
do you allow yourself to be sure of-boozy drawl of bees,
wet cricket flex, hollow-noted organ of a train running the line
to a country eroded, rinsed clean, even now.
-Andrew Grace
