for samson, his sky
the way I’d show up and leave into night and he’d still be out with that orange bike
the carburetor pried open a can of cleaner in the gravel. I told him it was going
to work this time— summer was working, after all, and we’d listen to kansas songs
in garages, the one about waywardness, about weariness mostly and that was years
ago. someone I kissed in a car on a beach wakes remembering the fog.
in dappled light two swans do that thing with their necks. I don’t know.
what it takes to bring a boy, my hand pulled back from a hot sky,
swearing I loved what I held. I did. calculus assumes that at a certain point
a curved line becomes straight but that just means anything orbiting
anything is always trying to get somewhere new. it’s strange. the world
smelling like warmth. like some listing star. as a kid the sky felt old in its
openness until I realized enough holes in anything will start to look like
night. like samson the circus elephant who pulled himself loose in my
hometown decades and decades ago who was shot til he fell to his knees but lived his
stomach now opened to his keeper, the man who loved him most, the man who said
from then on when samson would drink too much water the water would cascade from
him like song and samson leaked living and open down the road into the mouth of
another June.
Lesson
Let’s say there was once a dirt road. Let’s say the county finally paved it.
Let’s say the new asphalt sounded like nothing under the tires, the townspeople
remarking at its silence, its darkness, the way for weeks it looked wet
as if the rain had actually come. On hot days the tar held fingerprints, let’s say,
like black dough, like dough blackened. The stars dripped.?
The sky a highway. Let’s see—the earliest roads were made
by animals, Google tells me, which doesn’t really answer my question.
Let’s say a border is less about division and more about contact.
I didn’t think of God until I realized all the nation’s roads were connected,
that until I drove across the country I didn’t know the country was there.
My grandfather was the one who told me all even-numbered roads run west.
On his arm was a pale shape where he’d removed a tattoo of an American flag.
An expanse. Let’s say his pistol in the safe under the stairs was all I knew
of departure. For the sake of the couplet, let’s say I never wanted to leave.
