They carried my body like a horse rug
\nthrough the backyard. All skin, no air.
\nPotted peas hanging from rope, a wood
\npecker siphoning years from the heartbeat
\nof a willow. I was looking up from the black
\nhollow of my shadow like a sea cow following
\nthe shoreline. So in love with the diesel
\ngreasing the grass blades, the light finger
\nprint of each tip on my accordioned back.
\nThe march was short, like a dream
\nin which hours occur in drams. I took
\nthis time to remember the musical measures
\nof old lovers\u2019 neck stones. The different
\nways the sun would soprano through
\ntheir hair. And I remembered the glass
\nface of hate. How it was sharp from start
\nto finish. And I wondered the number
\nof who still felt it now. I pictured them
\nhearing the news that so-and-so
\nfrom the college years or that desk job
\nfinally absorbed the earth like a sponge \u2013
\nthat alchemical mixture of emotion, of nothing
\nto say but sure, sorry, send over the details.
\nI focused on my mother and her fingernails,
\nalways inked with soil, tomato blood, keeping
\nmy father from losing himself to God.
\nMy older brother weeping into the bed sheets
\nand his older brother ignoring the phone call.
\nI looked up to the salmon sun over Montana
\nrivers, shouldered by mountains, atheistic
\nto the satellites blinking out Morse. I recalled
\na girl choking on the lightness of morphine.
\nHow her blonde braids were donated
\nto the homeless. Some beads of rain never
\nblossom into energy. This sadness and evidence
\nmust be specific. We look down at our chests
\nto find not a knife, but a sparkler, just lit. <\/p>\n