Landscape with Morning Coming On

The cracked window is a soundboard for the wind. You dream, as light pollution leaks
around blackout curtains, of a police siren over flat river water. To let us overhear
our nightmares. My stomach twists the oil in my gut. When the sun comes up

the birds begin. Men walk beside their fences marking sunlight’s progress
with wind-stripped shingles, talking as they go. A fence defines the land as parcel of land

within an allotment. Far end of the yard the dog snaps at small insects in the tree.
A piece of bailing wire far up the trunk where branches begin. When forced to consider
the language-made world, I remember your hand on my hand on your stomach.

The streetsweeper covers your breath as a car passes and slows to a stop at the end of the block.
The driver talks back to the radio; a woman loads her suitcase into the trunk. Behind the partition she thinks of touching the glass.

Your body curled around mine; a single contrail frayed into the sky above the glacial lake.
Other voices carried over clear, black water as white streaks burned and shattered
above us. We undressed under that thinning. Highway near still, and the snow melt

in the river, the floodlit bay. There is part of us chained to the concrete
floor beside the sea. Laughing gulls scatter after
the track of gunfire plays. The fence unfolds the sea

in pinholes where the wire frays the blue tarp.
When your dream shakes you, I touch your face and believe

I hear your breathing even out.

Trash Mountain

When you shoot a deer that small it’s like shooting
a dog. When you shoot a dog it’s like shooting a deer
in the soft nape of the neck where the hair curls.

The swollen artery bursts the gray dawn
in the small forest between the hill and the road
when the headlights flash over we can’t tell

what runs there before us, small and limping
to the fence line. Where the clearing begins to rise,
turf buckles up a hill. It drags itself,

a swollen tick into the light. The halogen playground
lights the center of the scenic view. Standing on
the landfill in the view of what created it:

our three states spread beneath us. The insurance
building skyline, limping hills, and in the pastures
limpid fog lakes gather ambient light like

pearly stones submerged in mud inside the animal
tracks. At the foot of the hill, concrete lines
the valley where another hill begins as an open sore.

Laughing gulls startle up and settle on gas pipes
where the water streams off the hill

behind us as we follow the small red drag-marks
over the plastic streambed and back inside the tree-line.

Small Machines

To look up at stars and see
the stars again.

The dog is pissing on the light post
so piss falls on cool grass.

Tonight the migrant birds pass
above us as we sleep

in silent, cloistered wingbeats.
Now only crickets sing in the depot

and freight trains beside the river.
I wasn’t drunk. I stood last night

and watched a single engine
couple oil cars together.

The single headlight on the track—I know we were
alive together. No one waved

at me from the railing. My name was
in your mouth. And the light over the door.