Cold Open

It was the thought that — 

if you could watch, if I could leak to the public the film of when I needed to reach you — 

that would be one way.

From a little-known bluff overgrown last summer with wildflowers,

if you could watch a family of turkeys,

a mother and 162 poults,

if you could watch them abandon their roost on the lowest branch of a cottonwood tree,

and lugging 163 tow cables behind them when they departed,

if you could watch them dragging the tree through a field overgrown last summer with

tanglehead grass.

And discarding the yellow tree pitilessly across the rails of the Sunset Limited,

which was carrying that day exactly 162 passengers west to their sentencings.

It could be one way, I kept telling myself, to awake in summer when everyone’s sentenced

and film myself shut of those dead to me.

If the lights came up on my train in a field overgrown last summer with tanglehead.

If we could slow to a halt in front of the yellow tree obstructing our path.

There could be a smash cut,

an establishing shot of the bluff where you knelt cutting wildflowers,

and off-camera if the cottonwood started hemorrhaging yellow termites,

if you could see the mites glowing yellow having drunk the yellow blood of the tree.

If I could leak to you what the camera work couldn’t — 

in a hand-me-down suit

an unsavory man

he’s inside a renaissance cherry casket,

and the casket’s buried eight feet beneath the Sunset Limited’s engine room,

and the casket’s rigged on the inside with a hand-crank generator,

with Christmas lights in five colors,

if we leaked red first then blue,

if we leaked green before we leaked orange,

last yellow,

the light of which illuminates the interior of the casket enough for the man

(he’s alive)

to watch his face decompose in the mirror that’s rigged to the ceiling,

if we could cut to the sentence handed down to the man many years ago,

that any unsavory man is a man who should watch himself die.

If there was a slow zoom on a woman’s hands typing eight words in first class,

a slow dissolve to a child in coach,

if he fingers a text that says don’t change for you,

don’t change for me, if there’s no ellipsis, no period at the end,

if he doesn’t need to ask who it’s from.

From a little-known bluff you could stand up with a fistful of wildflowers.

If you could watch the faces of 162 passengers darken unannounced

as if from a lightning storm.

The cottonwood could stand up from the rails and dust off her own blood herself.

Resume her cold work, untangling the grasses.

If you could watch my train resume its terrible campaign for the west.

Unseen for you I could stay buried here,

beneath 162 suitcases with the rest of the stowaways.