Pieces

the song of the ambulance

moving through the iron city

with a chorus of ancestors

circling in it's abrupt wake

we will not see home again

the fisherman

by the concrete shores

calling with vulgar benediction

the old tidemarks rising

as his boat waits

short lives of once-fluttering

birds now smeared into pavement

the old truck sitting in the field

gutted and rain-bare, it's leather

the shade of cracked flesh

all of the dead cowboys

the ones who hoist their own

ticking dreams before igniting

their own hands

cupping the tops of skulls

& the white camellia gasping into

the wild distances

as the spring light lengthened

into the otherness of a morning

i will never know