Brother,
Wish I had a yard to point to, a sight more than beige
apartment backs and shoddy suburban grass, wilder
than the fat pigeons and the fat neighbor kids, than my
fat-bellied America and its white-washed jowls; a wild
to own with a deck full of knots and creak, that stretches
with sun and rain and the sweat of barbeque and beer
with friends, my own wild planked wood rooted deep
into soft soil and open air, and a few cheap-metal lawn chairs
that would get lost if I placed them on my knotted
prairie lawn. You would come, wouldn’t you? To toast
the nights, watch the sun bruise itself down into the blister
of the earth and search for my beasts. I wish to tell you:
Brother,
That beast has been waiting for you to visit, see how
its eyes gleam? There’s a mischief here I can thumb at, more
than old devils, more than mania and Jesus and yellow eyes
in my dark. But I point at the yellow eyes, anyways
and ain’t they lovely? Like pulling stars from behind
a sailor’s storm? But, honest, Brother, I’ve no more
than dust to give you, baked earth that don’t seem so baked
unless you press the palms of your skin against it, it nearly
holds its own against the open-flame sun, it’s so used
to being sore. I tell you Brother, it only shows its dust
when you try to scruff it clean, or look too long
at the lonely Saguaros, each one a husk of solitary
each one a husk of spines reaching, doubling, tripling limbs
but never touching anyone of their own.
Rhiannon Thorne 