On Whipporwill Road,
I watched myself wither up,
my skin shrivel and pucker
like tomato in the dry sun:
my insides were tough
jerky, ready to be gnawed
and torn off by some gator,
who would suck and lick
his claws in satisfaction
one after another, to leave
my weathered and callous
bones on the rusty banks
of Lake Meredith, waiting,
wishing to be cast wind
blown to sacred dust
and carried away to
the Colorado Rockies,
the coldest night of sleep yet,
all cocooned in my blankets,
wiping my running nose
on my sheets and dreaming
wearily that maybe I'll
wake up with a set of wet
wings, spread them red-orange
shimmer silver in the morning
sun crept silent over
the west bank mountains,
steaming the rocky men
awake in their boots
and becking me brick
up my britches and flutter
out warily, testing the air
for it's consistency:
can it carry me aloft? or
will I fall crashing into
some Granby pine? hear it
wince and whine the impact,
and find myself stuck
sap side of earwax
to its crying core trunk,
listen to its branches crack
and hiss wet into his fire
on the ground, prodding
the fat log left from the night
before, breathing, blowing
into the smoke coming
from its bottom smolder
and beg it re-fire its tomb
into my hollow womb,
a baked bourbon baby
all blank eyed and war
scared of wire and willing
to singe the soles
of our feet to a healthy
black brown buckwheat
mountain honey
and bristled black berries
all plucked precariously
from their twiggy branches,
the chance of me finding
a final chapter to my
filtering senescence
is unlikely as the possibility
that Hell exists in
the Christian sense,
along with purgatoried Heaven,
where we wait for washed up
loved ones on its hazy shore
of enchantment-come-dis-
enchantment, disillusioned
and dissolved all pearly
glass sand grain to molecular
nothing is everything
and if you're everywhere
you're nowhere on Earth
I've found--
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