for K.
She found me walking in the overpowering silence of an Indiana snow.
The film-covered fists disregarding the space of her, prided her.
The leaden cumulus our drifting jury.
. . .
I heard that dog barking but
It just sounded as laughter.
Like he knew something I didn’t
And was waiting for it to hit me.
I saw the sun dimmed enough to look at
In that early evening blizzard.
I was listening to her voice
Washed by the dark and wilting out, near.
I watched her drowning in the icy river
I hear every night through an open window.
I saw her arms stretched out to me through
The jaundiced glass of a broken factory.
Abandoned, twenty stories above me,
I am telling her to jump,
I am not reaching to catch her.
. . .
I saw a flayed crane floating that river,
I saw her eyes in the dim, looking past my shoulder.
I saw a tongue I had removed myself to end
The singing of an anthem she’d never heard.
I saw the tops of trees swaying in the snow
Like a row of plucked heads that never stop shaking.
I saw each footstep in the snow behind me
Filling up like glacier lakes with water so wan.
I saw a theater with everyone seated
Facing away from a screen that was flashing cloudless.
It was someone’s life,
Someone’s eyes.
I saw an old woman playing an accordion made
Of scars and smoke and she never quit smiling, smiling right at me.
I saw an unkindness of dark matte feathers gathering at the top of a bare tree—
They know what’s past my shoulder but no one is talking.
I saw horses grazing in the middle of the night off the highway,
One to the side of the road, color of ash and spread open to the flies,
The road, the flooding.
I want to touch that triumphant crane,
And watch that factory burn.
. . .
Ever the voice of a smothered bird.
Mewling angel.
She’s saying to me, next to the Kankakee River.
Her parents found her paintings,
burned every last one.
The day the ground thaws she’s gone.
Her lips were appointed a charnel black,
Black as a road, let’s say
Five hundred miles long.
—–
This piece has been reworked about a dozen times, and I’m finally getting happy with it. This is the newest draft, after probably its 5th workshop / editing through…
