all nature needs
to destroy you Spore
fr. spora sowing seed
I will see your toll and raise you
one hundred sixty-one
7. DOVECOTE
windows blown-in
and empty-socketed as a skull
against the hospital’s
bone-slabbed concrete—
roost, thou forsaken
—absence is its own home
ATAVISM AT TWILIGHT
Lance and drain this ravened sky—hat in hand we will
Always return to you, prodigal. I swear we knew
Not what we did. I swear. Land unscrubbed to rust,
Gashed and bare—hell’s toothed pastoral. No
Excuses. Pitchfork my soul, millet on your scale, but
Let not this harvest strip flesh from bones. Pray
Unsheathe your sword and make of my heart a ragged tear.
Salvage this earth, snarl grass and field. I will take it all.
BLACK HORIZON
Grand Isle, Louisiana, 2010
Post-Deepwater Horizon oil spill
Like ribbons of kelp, they wash up
bark-black and stretching
far as the eye can see—boys
sway in the waves, skin sheened
in oil as they toss the tar balls.
A quick game of pickup.
On the shore, cleanup crews
weave a path between beach
towels, Hazmat-suited,
shovel and plastic bag in hand.
It never fails to shock: dark
pools oiling sands of blinding
white. I load my open palms
with them, testing their heft.
These scales cannot be balanced.
And always more cresting
the waves, merciful as death.
IN WHICH SHE OPENS THE BOX
Celia Steele in Delaware, 1923
1.
Even as a child I hungered
for them, fox in the henhouse,
my mother said. And a whole lot
worse. When I opened the box
to 500 straw-padded eggs instead
of the 50 I ordered, I wasn’t
thinking waste not, want not
or, a chicken in every pot.
I was thinking how I’d grown.
Thinking of life, and how
can anyone argue with that?
The yolk’s yellow chalk afloat
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