The Neighbor Columns

the blackbirds were his first target.

when he had reached the pillars

he would slow way down

and, careful,

place his hands.

his wide eyes kept, and betrayed, him a boy

on in from the first touch

critic of the cut

a disciple of the weight

bed time in our bunk beds he'd

tell me he was looking for the ravens in the marble

not to startle in their eye

but to move in their bones

i never slept the nights

he had run to the neighbor columns

for the crow of exhausted birds still circling overhead.

'Mickey'

The garage door came alive once.  All on its lonesome.  One blast from a thunderhead and it succumbed to mechanical fits, slapping the driveway and rolling like eyes back to the rafters, possessed in its wire veins by a white flicker from the sky.

It was a thunderstorm of the furious sort that tumble and convect over country in the northern Great Plains.  My two older brothers and I gawked at the sheet rain thrashing the windows of our green rambler in Austin, near the Iowan border.  I remember the sky greening with dusk.  The humid inhale and the stillness.  As our world twisted away from the sun, and moved through the checkered casts of summer evening, the storm laced its gloves and settled low.  Our parents were away for the evening, and Grandma Mickey had come for the night.

Cowboy

pays me and then
the man tells me he doesn't normally ride horses
that he just wants to see the desert
i see cold snagged in the cracks of his duster
and too the passing offers of stars
so i'd guess
he's just tired of walking