Another autumn peels forth from the walls, leaving
apple-red strewn over the birdhouse on the front lawn.
I think how you saw this place and said we’d be lucky to live here.

My love, you're never wrong. The porch ceiling shimmers my smoke.
Still, that cough in my spine's getting deeper. Sally said this afternoon: maybe something’s fighting to come out, or be wiped away.

My spliced mind's the concrete that old seed’s entombed with.
My roots grew deep in that road he stuck his knife into,
the one they paved solid and covered thick with white pickets.

If I could go back I would leave a time capsule on that hill
with all our sticks and rocks, in our pinestraw nest in the bushes.
I’d leave something for us I still can’t name.

*

There’s permission in the wind, Sally says: Still, still, to change.
The migrating flock in the sky finds its symmetry as soon as I sense it.

Wait — there was a clarity that day in Virginia before,
when the mountain sang back each leafblown psalm.

Grey solemns stretched their patient palms for miles.
My brother stuck his tongue out, and he giggled like a child.