More than leaves, dust and wind
envelop the football game in the meadow.
It is an enormous, ill-defined ball of Artie tumbleweed

It is like drowning,
The water of the eyes spills back into the head
It coats the skull like honey

I am never getting married or having babies
after I saw what happened to these dogs we had
named Max and Phoebe. One day we heard this

We begin every night ignorant,
two xenophobes called in from exile,
pleased to the point of buoyant.

You must remove your sleepmask, haul it
from your eyes, sleep a white sleep without
slapping floodwaters—let it go,

Somebody’s aunt out swabbing her birdbath
with Lysol and the town paper mill down the block
is beginning to blister in a clean shock

How parched, how marrow-dust dry
they must get on their long surface and undersea
journeys—huge stuffed husks,

Thud, thud, all the sores go blind,
and over the basket of pears hover
brief addicted fruitflies.

One of these days she will lie there and be dead.
I’ll take her out back in a garbage bag
and bury her among my sons’ canaries,
the ill-fated turtles, a pair of angelfish:

Standing in November (as the dead 
Brown color seeps into the land), 
In waders and in water, with a red