Oil pumps rock steadily on the long ridge
like mosquitoes on a sleeping man’s arm
while behind the power plant, frogs emerge
from the black pond. Near a neighboring farm,
an antique radio phases between
“Mr. Sandman” and a faint foreign voice,
occasionally crackling into brief
periods of silence. The older boys
smoke cigarettes underneath a streetlight,
their shadows splayed across the white silos
in the feed lot. Every few hours, headlights
burst over the hill like a flare, a gold
penumbra on the horizon that fades
to a narrow beam above the highway.

I place my ear against the glass,
cicadas chirr in sorghum rows—
a sidewind moves the brittle grass,
a dust cloud lifts above the road
until the headlights burn it thin.
An engine labors up the grade,
gravel snaps the chassis skin—
axles creak, then comes the frame,
then wheels align outside the yard.
A hinge resists, a door gives way.
A strip of yellow splits the dark;
the porch receives a stranger’s face
becoming mother with each step:
I fold into her long blue dress

My uncle watched that tree all winter long—its patient bark,
the rope-scars catching dusk like half-closed eyes;
his boyhood ended there—a narrow pasture marked
by hooves and harm, where lashing is a sign.
He drove us out where ice replaced the shore,
a mirror set against the world’s return;
my brother paled—hands frozen to the door,
the windows starred with snow; the cedars blurred.
We shed our clothes, the snow received our weight,
then wiped our footprints clean as if we’d never come.
John cut a path the storm could not erase
and led us to the shoulder of the pond.
He walked the ice and summoned me alone,
his hammer fixed above the winter skin—
the wind returned; the cattails bent in rows,
my brother watching from the snowbank’s rim.
I held my place; the heavens offered no reprieve—
A boy consents. The ice proceeds.

Across the wires, white hairs rest,
caught in red on the barbs.
Her scent lingers near the fence,
worked through stake and spars.
I lift the axe to the moon,
a circle rests in the blade,
hangs there like a pale rune
before the stroke is made.
She stares behind a tree,
snow gives beneath her weight:
she sees the ice break free,
beneath the moonless blade.
Her hips shift; she glides down
across the frozen ground.

I choose a corner where the rafters lean,
so near they press the night against my skull;
the joists resist—the timber, tight and mean—
and walls grow thin enough to hear your pulse.
The mountain’s dust has settled in your chest;
you vanish downward—wordless, slow, and deep—
the earth receiving you like stolen breath.
No ladder down. No light to mark the slope.
You disappear the way a door goes dark.
You said: The fire’s near—move from the tribe;
strike flint to keep our worlds apart.
Don’t stay too long in Leadville’s starless night.
Repeat the tale: this town is not your home;
the blood that stains its rocks is yours alone.

The house holds fast the measure of a man:
a beam draws tight, the stair accepts the strain.
Her rocking keeps the upper dark aground,
his voice breaks down to timber, dust, and grain.
She rocks the boys as ballast, not as kin,
their legs gone slack with years they haven’t lived.
The night instructs them how a man comes in
and how his body must at last be moved.
I’ve seen this passage set inside the bone:
the pull from father into son made plain,
a tensile line no hand can call its own,
drawn tight by care, by duty, and by pain.
It held until I felt him start to fall;
no law remained—just balance, weight, and wall.

A large hand opens over me, discreet,
its shadow holding one man tinged with green;
the light holds fast, though altered where we meet,
as moonlight thins the margin of the seen.
I bow. The others keep to hedge and ground,
beyond the garden, measured in their space.
They shape my childhood calmly, without sound,
as if removing something out of place.
It holds to sequence, spare and unadorned:
a pause, a turn, the interval made plain.
We move as sleepwalkers, loosely formed,
our bodies passing through what still remains.
No one explains why they came and did not leave;
on Fountain Street, I stepped from the unseen.

The windows flare—then gutter—glass
throws out the elders’ watchful faces;
boys loom larger as they pass
each year from thaw to summer solstice.
Past the street the shore retraces
mottled trails—mud-soaked shoes;
low voices caught in open spaces,
the moon a cut, the sun a bruise.
Past alpenglow—a boy at play
whirls hard around the locust bole;
arms flung wide—then dropped away—
jackdaws rake the evening whole.
Before the street had sound
the trees lay black. The sky pressed down.

A stray cat purrs in the fireweed beside
my window. I pull my mint-green blanket
close to me, and listen to the open night,
my older brother quiet in his bed.
A Malamute growls in the neighbor’s yard,
rounding a corner, link by link, its chain
raking a shed as it lunges and barks
at a figure sitting in the garden.
The moon throws slanted shadows on the wall:
a hedge-apple tree bent in the wind,
caught under the wire of a telephone pole,
its branches spreading slowly like a hand
in silhouette. It settles to stillness—
long, black fingers folding into a fist.

I.
A plank lies set between the attic beams,
a narrow bridge above the living room.
Your father builds it. Women come by morning,
then one by one withdraw in turn by noon,
the ladder folding neatly in the wall.
One night his leg bursts through the ceiling’s skin—
a sudden limb, a snake, a breach, a fall—
then slips back up, obedient to pain.
Your mother murmurs in the bedroom
with a man whose voice is spare and thin.
A bruise appears, that violet bloom,
on father’s thigh, unfolding under skin.
The house exhales. The body does not sleep.
What breaks the skin has other doors to keep.

II.
A dog the size of weather fills the yard.
Its breathing lifts the house like tidal wood.
The children hover, unadmitted, barred
by what was set in place before it stood.
At night it swells—black lung, black ribs—draws
the dark inside itself, then gives it back.
Its shoulders grind the fence. Its jaw withdraws
no answer from the walls it leans to crack.
Warm breath invades the attic, fogs the beams.
The ceiling bows. Teeth worry through the sheet.
The lamps go dim. The windows lose their seams
as lips slide down them, sealing up the street.
The house holds still. The dog completes its span.
The night has found a body shaped like man.