Could you not look after me another day?
Why did you go alone? I leave in only another day.

If your gravestone is not erased first my head will be.

Bathwater smells like it.
Like when you turn left off Percival
onto Smallwood and pass Old Percival

I came from life from living I arrived

Nowhere     in the midst of God     in the midst of God

God is a city      in which no one has ever lived

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

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

squirrel killer 
predawn snacker 

Nobody lives
above me,

The first time we ever quarreled
You were cutting an onion
In the kitchen of our rented cottage.

Strollers, diapers, bottles overwhelm
the young mother in the nether reaches
of life after birth no one told her about,

The burnt-red fox darts in front
of the car’s path late at night,
and I’d like to call this an encounter,