We learned to stack a cord of wood by sound,
the wedge set where the log confessed its seam;
a single stroke would open it—a weakness found,
the grain split true along its rings.
We learned to gut a snake, to coax the wet
machinery from its sleeve—the venom sac
a charm of sorts, an olive amulet
that dangled from its open neck.
We learned to burn the vespid’s rooms,
we tilted gas into their paper keep—
a match, and all their architecture bloomed
then vanished in the heat.
And then we learned to pray. Though no one said
why every word was balanced on the dead.

In rhododendrons, something wakes and stirs.
Tar-paper shacks on blackened slopes incline
toward wind; the dogs go rigid, ears upturned—
their master tilts his lamp, a narrow shine.
Their orange coats quiver in the hollow;
their howls pour downward, spill through trees.
A pine bows under weight it cannot follow—
some unseen quarry shifting in the canopy.
The grass at field’s edge ripples, breaks, reforms
in waves and eddies; stillness, then again.
The dogs regroup beneath the brush, their forms
held taut between recall, scent and strain.
The moon rolls past the clouds without a sound—
headlamps form a constellation on the ground.

Outside of Boise, four black horses bolt
quickly past my window, slow to a trot,
then pull away, their obsidian coats
shimmering like sunlight on the blacktop.
I am barely awake. The night before,
in the panhandle of Oklahoma,
I fixed a flat tire in a lightning storm,
watching the dense nerves of light branch over
the blue nimbus clouds in the northern sky.
There was no sound, other than the engine.
On such a night, Saul may have held his knife
closer to his chest—by morning, the sun
nothing more than a warm breath on his cheek,
his horse leading him into the city.

The sun is dragging low inside your breath.
Each step you take sounds brittle in the shale—
a knock of bone on slate, the quiet death
of cartilage that’s learned it cannot heal.
The plain beneath us scraped to something bare,
a sheet of iron hammered past the breaking form;
your weight slips once; your hand rakes empty air,
then hooks the rock, the threshold rough and worn.
Son, we came here to name our ruin,
not mend it. Past the tree line’s ragged mark,
the wounds you carried into me lie strewn
in talus. All that’s left of men grows stark
and simple—ash and weather, breath and dune.
Take what remains. The mountain keeps the dark.

If you’re standing within swinging distance,
you’re standing too close, you’d say, shoulders squared.
But you were all bluster. In Nebraska parlance,
it really meant I want to embrace you as a brother.
You knew the same back roads I traveled and forgot,
those gravel barrens leading mostly nowhere,
to overgrown cul-de-sacs or abandoned feed lots,
the kind urbane folk rightfully fear.
To say we held debates would be a slander.
You would only offer: Speak plain. You’d say:
With your words, you could bring many over
to Christ. I was too arrogant in those days
to parse my pain from my avarice,
too cocksure to accept what was
the deepest embrace: the promise beyond

brotherhood—of stewardship and sacrifice.
Your death has only hardened what was wrong
when I left my church in that corner of Kansas
too afraid to claim myself, too young
and unwilling to forgive my family
for their imperfections. One by one,
they are crossing over; any lingering grief—
any doubt their corporeal bodies
resurrect to light in paradise—
could now only be construed as mocking
the dead, or a disregard for the righteous—
or worse yet, a violation of the faith
you put in me with your embrace.

to visit the bed of an old lover.
What do I tell her—Do I fill her head
with secrets, or brush the truth like dander
from my hair? There is no balm in Gilead,
this is not manna, nor gossamer flakes
from desiccated saints whose frozen ash
melts on my tongue—it is the Cascade’s
autumn wind blowing through Snoqualmie Pass,
shaking the white crowns from the evergreen.
On the outskirts of Moses Lake, a crow
skims their broken tips—like an augur’s dream
scattered by daylight on the open road,
it wings irrespective of my vision,
angling lightly over Washington.

In spring, fireweed sprouts above Puget Sound,
rose-tipped cairns that lure a flock of seagulls
downward, winter-worn, to form a hill’s crown.
In the mouth of the bay, a tugboat’s hull
severs the slack water like black fabric,
the shape of the prop-wash an oil-green trail
that opens as a fan. The captain flicks
his cigarette butt against the ship’s wheel
and turns south to the beach, taking a fix
on the basalt cliffs at the shoreline’s rim,
the chalk-white shelves collapsed above the rocks.
He charts a constellation on his arm,
the face of a hill which blooms in a rash—
the birds now spiraling upward like ash.

She’s been here before. The grass takes skin
as payment—thought swells past its given size,
a swollen court convened to discipline
the body it inhabits and denies.
The sun impresses dull authority
upon her cheek, a mark that does not ask,
as if the field had staged her silently
with milkweed stalks and hydrangea husks.
She flares her nostrils. Breathing, she decides,
is thread pulled thin toward nothing she can see,
or cloudstuff waiting, stalled and undefined.
Meanwhile the sun, exact in appetite,
burns through the afternoon without appeal—
pure self, consuming what it cannot feel.

Your sins, random in youth, now interlace
as latticework in time you cannot leave.
You feel the warp and weft secure their place,
a frame that learns your shape by odd degrees.
Branch braided into limb, vine into nerve,
misjoined, yet fastening the life you own—
a blighted map you follow, swerve by swerve,
to hollows cupped beneath the oldest stone.
A scold of jays flutters just behind your ears,
their cries dispersed throughout the evening air;
the canopy comes loose. You stand and hear
your years let go, like leaves, like thinning hair.
The crown gives way. What sang departs the head.
You keep the frame. The body learns instead.