We drink wine,
sleep in the sun and look at the blue smear of the river far beneath us.
Later, I walk past the edge of town,
out along a country road where red-winged blackbirds live.
An old man is putting in a garden.
He has gone in for lunch
and planted one glove each on two sticks of his picket fence
and his hat on a third.
My hands are balled into fists
like the woman in the blue coat
walking so purposively,
her hands pointed straight out before her,
as if she were blind,
stumbling through the thickets of air.
Back in the city, spring multiplies in a drunkenness of mud and water,
the houses with high fences like barbed wire,
sudden whine of a siren turning into a shriek,
the mother who shouts, “OK, fifteen minutes!”
The mother who shouts, “Now!”
Sometimes five senses are not enough,
not enough cups to catch the rain,
the bodiless voices from open windows,
wind shifts,
new grass cracking open the dead earth.
Walking the prison yard on the first spring night
Doug said, “Remember street lights,
how they cast a shadow?”
We looked past the old wooden gun tower
to the Missouri fields
ploughed into the blackness; and there too, the red-winged blackbirds
flinging themselves against the last light
beyond the prison glare,
almost brushing the fields
as if they were a second, wing-tipped, horizon,
moving so fast as to be barely visible.
This is the wilderness beyond the body’s last border
where the old man puts on his garden gloves again to grow fruit in the prison, the world.