left alone to the no stranger of myself
I lie in a furrow with my tongue dressed in shouts
taken by strangeness my backwards love for birdcalls
I whistle back to to cows chewing cud I eat mud
for field mice the screech owls that snatch them up
my love unmatched for paperbacks soaked
in roadside puddles my love for amber beer glass
tempered in the coals the ash of a bonfire
my love an outcry in a field a sharecropper left behind
for heavy-stepping boots in a barn without horses
for horses the filly the Ardennais with no rider
for roadkill a cloud of flies swarming dark redness
for my father his love for houses he breathes his sadness into
nothing said here gets heard I am a silence
crowned with the feathers of bluebirds
a stammerer with a tongue cut on utterances
crazy for this world maybe I will live out a forever or two
and never once put our shadows down
my brother my father our voices bottled in a mason jar
full of grasshoppers and fall asleep against a wolf tree
to the music they sing with their knees
I want to live in a house my father dreamed
and in this dream our wilderness tamed
outdoors to sleep my brother wakes me
with his hands fists burnt by sunbeams
my love for him too my brother listen
when I say no blood looks foolish to me