Warm abstraction, glimmer and fruit
Of progress, hope and comfortable psychology
We forgive the promises of love, drugs and dieting

The smothering heat of a July night
Squats in a second floor bedroom
And doesn’t move despite the desk fan’s

Dark gathers
In this wood
Without weather

Avenging ivy padding up the wall of the Abbey’s west wing
Could only be part of a masterplan to rescue posterity
From a curling, yellowing, nonetheless dangerous manuscript

There is a woman living inside
that man, deep in his chest, almost
in spite of his life. She is beautiful

moments like this one, the green carpet
looking for once just the right green,
is it the lighting, or your shadow thrown

In another parched summer,
Comancheros gone, we rock
on the screened back porch, fanning,

In a deep well I swung a pickax
into packed caliche, so dark I aimed the ax
by feel. My brother leaned back safe

is coming from the hunters’ woods
with open hands, allowing

There are still hammers, aren’t there,
somewhere, and bricks dried in brick kilns?