I dreamed of my father
crossing the fields
on his one-eyed tractor
mowing acres of sadness
heading east of a moon
that'll be gone tomorrow
and I waded the creek
beneath a ridge
where my mother is shearing
dead roses and the smell
of those flowers floating
to the foot of the mountains
reminds me of her hair
and my father's laughter
disappearing across the hill.

I used to stay up all night
driving through pastures
in a sweetheart's daddy's jeep

I remember the moon in the woods
through the trees like a girl
running in white *******

Like a boat losing its shadow
to the wind, you can lie
yourself back into bodies
you never touched

What love there was
flashes by like chrome
on a fender skirt.

Her body is a plantation
I worked on for twelve years,
all of them solid, deep
summer, uncleared timber,
backwater, ditch and slough,
times of bad cotton, dark
nights and no crops, hard rain,
riding shotgun over my love.

I am thinking of the dead
who are still with us
on their way in the rain
to meet lovers or brothers
and my sadness waves back
like grain in the fields
of lost summers and summers
before that, fireflies in the dark
still young and beautiful
like starry nights, but for them
there is no moon, and for us
the same news we do not receive.

One night soon
someone
will strike a match
on a stone
and read my name.

Blue as the geography
of footprints across the dunes
quiet as the white music
of a silent moon
like the wind blowing
the soul off the water
the shadows go out
and are lost in the evening
I conclude the hypothesis
of sundown making no sound
while night climbs the vines
where lowing sadness abides
the ritual of tides pulls me under.

There was a girl
quite beautiful
who drowned herself
drinking they say
without blinking
like an infant suffocating
while sleeping without care
out where a lifebuoy
floats like a soggy rose
marking the spot
they last heard her
singing while sinking.