My subject, myself, my object, I / too have spent my whole life / hungry. Any human contact / brings news of me to me.

A quiet to these fields we called our place, / could almost hear the springs refeeding ponds, / fracked and gone with the deer and fox and grouse / thanks to the drilling’s thunder in the ground.

The river changed course / By three feet. / Thus the willow withers from thirst. / Thus the rock is set alone like an altar. / Thus the grassy hill browns.

How many little lives in between my fingernails, how many layers / of sod, of seed? This cold grass is all corpse and it’s only six o’clock /
in the evening. At the group home, I’ll spoon green beans and strained peaches / into my grandfather’s mouth, push them back onto his plate when he shoves

I’m the strut of starlight / in the open tabernacle— / I’m the songs of leopard frogs / in the dew-spackled grass.

That absence filled with water, and we swam: / kept to the surface, above rusted beams / and weeds and car or body parts, above / sequins of glass, or rutted signs, or cans / crushed to bright coins, or hypodermics.

I remember when you found your mother, said your uncle. / You close your eyes, / smell chlorine. See the backyard’s cedars, / bougainvillea shadow her swollen body.