If the crown of day is not gold, then it’s a marvelous fake.
Merciful present tense: if the brown grass is always flowing,
if the sun is always just brushing the dry hills, and if
last summer’s suicide is still a loner whose white t-shirt
knotted, so tight it had to be cut off his neck with a penknife,
then evening is the same bare patch and the same fat crows,
the crushed aluminum cans and the hamburger wrappers
or the ribbon of tire tread where a road crew hasn’t come by.
They have taken him away and I do not know where he is laid.
Among the soft cheat and meadow barley, a live oak begs relief
from the hardened light, the beating of its own gnarled limbs,
and the unrelenting rustle of its own beige blooms that tumble
together shyly like a locker room of boys once boisterous, now
called to roll and suddenly bashful, clasping at dingy towels.
Let the dead be modest. Give the tree, solitary being who feeds
on wind and the mote of another’s distant beauty, cause to brag.
Except that the kernel would fall upon the soil, it abides alone.
One guy peeled labels off beer bottles here; another climbed
the remaining concrete piles and wrote JUSTIN LOVES, wrote
STEPHEN LOVES, WROTE HANG ’EM HIGH—CLASS OF ’93.
Cabbage moths flickered in tansy and clustered broom-rape;
bore the pain of creation for a little yellow dust, a smear of light
on their fidgeting legs and the sudden buoyancy in updraft.
Ruin, by the wayside, you took as sacrament. You, abiding rock.