This
Nor'easter, that I've read about in magazines
featuring mallards on the cover, cracks across
a sky erect, industrial chimneys.
Pittsburgh spits you out.
You're crossing the country as your own Iditarod and
I'm making no plans, biding time on a screen porch,
calming the dogs, or tracing a finger across the
finish of heart-pine, heat radiating off my
arms and legs. I'll be leaving these things behind:
two magnolias, the crystal decanter labelled
Rum. In my absence they will fill with meaning.
I'll learn gravity while I'm gone. How to use silence like
an X-Acto Knife. The twisting, silk ropes of touch
and torture, skin pinched up between.
Soot-owl, eyes like ravines,
I imagine you in peril:
arrested in a pasture at gunpoint,
bearing seven blows to the head, kneeling.
I am growing feral, as you predicted.
Foregoing sleep, barefoot, driving repeatedly
over my favorite bridges.