Apparition

I haven’t _________,
since smoke dried to salt in the lakebed, 
	since crude oil dripped from his parting slogan 
		the milk’s sky behind it,
			birds chirping from its wig. 

Strange, how they burrowed into the side of this rock.
	Strange . . . to think,
 they “belonged”
and stepped through the flowering of a future apparent in the rearview mirror, 
visible from its orbit 
	around a cluster of knives in the galaxy closest to the argument. 

Perhaps it was September  
that did this to him,
	his hostility struck the match on hand-blown glass,
not him,
	he had nothing to do with their pulse,
when rocks swarmed over 
	and blew as leaves along the knife’s edge
into summer, 
	without even a harvest between their lies 
		they ignited a fire—

			it reached sunlight in a matter of seconds. 




2.

It is quite possible 
it was the other guy 
		clammed inside my fist
 who torched the phone book 
 and watched blood seep from the light socket.
	 
Two days into leaving,
	the river’s outer frond flushes worms imagined in the fire
onto the embankment of rust, 
mud deep when imagination became an asterisk in the mind.

In this hue— 
earth swept to the center of the eye, 
		pulses outward from the last acre 
 held to the match’s blue flame. 

Mention ____________,  
and a thickening lump in the ozone layer 
	will appear as a house with its lights turned off—
			radio waves tangled like antlers inside its oven,
because somewhere 
	in the hallway nearest thirst, 
			the water coursing through our clans 
		begins to evaporate 
as it slides down our back seats—
 	its wilderness boiled out of our bodies.