He pushes behind the words 
which, awkward, catch 
and tum Him to a disturbed 

Nothing prepared me for your absence,
except, perhaps, the wind rattling stalks of autumn corn.

My world is always on the verge of silence,

One day last summer, Huck and I unpenned
The flock of geese that rubbagged by the barn
And herded them along with our two calves

The way the hunt progressed, I thought
The fox would hound me in my sleep, 
The way he carved the bottom land

After layoff in Richland after
moving into the 65-a-month prefab a
packing crate in an empty lot with

Driving through the mining counties
Green River to Central City
light of dawn like water
shadows rising to the surface

I had an accident but lived in elegance
on methamphetamines and small stacks
of Black Beauty paperbacks

I would like this poem
to be a machine.
Concise, metallic,
a counting apparatus.
A means to keep each moment
contained and fixed, akin
to a series of Polaroids,
photographed and fixed
to cardboard or some other
paper-panel backing.

Photographs of photographs and Polaroids
of stacks of books on fragments
and photographs and pamphlets
on letters sent and imminent
collisions. What the body does not know
it wants. And the mind.

A California of snow and the surprise
Of illness. I throned myself in the white
Noise of its silence and watched as the world