Riding to the Great Northern Wilderness
we sang about self-correction in the club car,
dreamed up new crimes to put in our autobiographies

Where Are You Going With That Wrench

A switch went and is going to take up the trip.
Jiggle the handle, engineers! Getting out of the train
to fix it yourselves? Be serious! We have

Well, Ford, people like us, we
Don't have to worry. We have the river
Coming up just here. Dancing came

Why shouldn’t you too have a woman?

Because U.S. 36 has always poured possibilities
through your hometown, you squeal smoking out of A&W Root Beer

All this happened when I was young:

I stopped knowing anybody. I waited for somebody to know me. I knew most of my strangers in depth; acquaintanceship stifled this; strangeness had to be the bond. Maybe I was too small to be seen. 

She was born Sarah Gossett Ballenger—
Sarah our mother's proper name, Gossett our mother's
family name, Ballenger the name of her father.

Sometimes in the evening I see
coming toward me, from a distance,
a kind of blossom: huge, blue, nodding

How strange to see their faces start to worry
Into ours, and after all those years
We spent pretending we had made a life

The sun’ s suspended like a drop of amber
Above the crescent of a colonnade.
And he is standing on a gravel path

There is a space abandoned here,
to this room, as to a panting dog;
and a sound, like scissors