LUCKY

After a week of long winds & rain the sun broke from the Sierras & I sat on the porch watching

The dark tables of turned-under corn & tall alfalfa & the dead glistening grasses

Across the road the wide field & the abandoned house I’m walking to

Months vacant & paint-flaked now a place where kids come to drink & fuck

The weather-pocked shed down to its bones its skin ripped up for firewood

In the back garbage still scattered & waiting to be carted off or buried the grass below it given up

I look in the glassless window & on the floor just a striped blood-brown mattress & empty green wine

& rust-colored beer bottles a few old rippled magazines & in the corner

The body of a hen her head broken to one side her back flat to the floor legs up the low

Underside of her belly eaten open—white feathers at wound’s edge still curled over the dry rim

The whole guts of the crater stony gray & stiff the half-gnawed entrails black

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Now this afternoon in the cold late-day sunlight

I have come to pick the roses at the front of the abandoned house grown wild in their winter bloom & tangled

Thick as nests as the thin branches of the climbers arc in long trails across the yard their pink babies’ fists

Beating on the wind & along the broken picket fence the green all hung with rose-stars—scarlet or crimson

All the blushes of red—& a few struck white & one the color of peach flesh or apricot

& pairs of small yellow lips & others burnt golden & three like melons thick-petaled dim suns & in each bush the dark

Stiff-stemmed rose hips nodding like skulls

*

That night when my headlights hit the front of the old house

She came from its far side running through the wall of roses choking & biting on the air

As she made it finally to my car where I stood at the open driver’s door brought by her screams

The rifle I’d pulled from above the mantel crooked in my elbow

The boys who’d been inside the house crashing out the back & peeling out in their midnight Cutlass

Back to Clovis or Selma

Sixteen & thrown out of everywhere for good & living sometimes with her grandparents in the foothills

She was down for a dance & then just a ride to get some beer it’d happened before she said & once with six

She says it closing her eyes

Then Lucky she says her name is Lucky combs out petals & crushed rose hips that float down

Sticking to her black angora sweater some torn petals she can’t brush away      white hen petals

Dark rose feathers