The Red Sun

It is winter.

The crows infest
the snow
like a plague.

In my mind
your hair
will always be as red
as a Virginian sun,

a slow sleeping fire.

I do not need much else.




America

I carry the poinsettia between my teeth.  Its dirtied veins
drag the ground behind me.  The red is a lie.
I did not kill it.

I crawl on white.  I make my home inside the snow.  The red
shines louder here, but I can bury it.  I can hide it softly
beneath the snow.

My heart, that bloody-spasm-tired thing.  It spreads its
thumping cloud over my snow.  It begins to rain.
There is no life for me here.




A Storm's Gonna Come

Grandaddy,
I would watch you in my nightgown,
your meal sitting before your TV chair
on a dinner tray
as you peppered your meat like a blizzard,

and just like a blizzard, Grandaddy,
you knew that one day I would feel this loss.

You knew it was gonna come.

You made it count, Grandaddy,
and when you finished your food, I would climb
up your legs and rest my young back
on the plump of your stomach.

Grandaddy, from your lap
the world seemed so small and warm.

Now everything is so big,
the trees, the houses, the people,
and it snows outside.

25 years later, you clutched my arm
and told me goodbye.

You smiled a nude smile.  A smile that
grieved for me and the hole I would soon feel. 

It was a smile that knew.

I am above the snow now, Grandaddy.
I floated over it like a cloud.  I am now
a bare person,
naked and raw as a bone. 

I am all bone now, Grandaddy,
and just like the winter storm,

you knew it was gonna come.




White owl, white bone

I drove through the canopy of night trees
without seeing.  I felt nothing.

The snow was a white owl, a white bone.

How many animal skeletons
have I ignored this year?
How many bones have I driven by
with gray spitting from my tires,
with winter cuckolded in my skin?

I do not know.




Globes of Light

I feel sweet,
like a relieved bladder.
My red onion body is once again
tender and fresh.

All things stretch
and reposition into place.

The forest falls
into the forest,
the ocean falls back
into the ocean.

Globes of light,
bright as moons,
hover the window after
he takes off into the new snow.

We are no longer friends,
he and I,
but I guess,

we never really were.