Trailer Park Études

The nights midweek are secrets kept.

No soul on site, no signal/bars,

and zilch for company except

a zillion bright disarming stars.

I’ll flit through ambers, quicker, higher.

I’ll break each hamlet’s stop or yield.

I’ll fix some noodles, start a fire

and climb up to the topmost field.

The stars at first are sparse, unclear.

They surface in that drag between

the darkened grass and stratosphere,

of powder blue and bottle green.

They blossom, thick and fast, in droves.

They pulse, in clusters, magnify.

The smoke that’s my potbelly stove’s

frays outwards through each needle eye.

I’ll head below. I’ll char till dawn

some apple logs down to their core.

By pewter light when stars have gone,

I’ll do a bit, a little more.

the rain

You live inside its sound effects

whole weeks on end: its pin machine,

its cardboard drum, its soft-boiled eggs,

its silent running submarine.

It’s like the god of liquid rub-

ber stirred at dawn to slip downstairs

and sip a cigarette, to drub

his fingertips on solid layers

you poured across last summer’s drought.

You love it, learn to, as it slows,

and even as you come to doubt

its dribs and drabs and pigeon toes.

Forget the welcome rain outstayed.

For days the leaves are parchment sheet

and wind hangs chimeless in the shade.

Still rain remains the point of heat.

The rain is near. Like everything,

it’s best those seconds just before:

the broadleaf ’s backwards canvas sling,

the fly strip flapping through the door.

the wind

The wind’s this ancient bloke below

who chunters “we,” who wheezes “us,”

though no one else will come or go.

You want to ask the wind “Who’s us?”

but hold your tongue till, in your head,

the wind and him have somehow mixed,

the type of wind that loves a shed

and banging on of things not fixed:

a belt-and-braces year-round wind,

a kiln-dried cobwebbed hardwood wind,

a greenhouse wind, a treebound wind,

an end-of-season car-boot wind,

a padlocked shower unit wind,

an upturned wheelie dumpster wind,

a channel not quite tuned-in wind,

a hollow flight-path thunder wind,

a dog-eared wind, a knocked-sign wind,

a spouseless phantom ocean-blown

autumnal graveyard Scots pine wind

who speaks in plurals, moves alone.

the grass

One night last June, in cups, in love

with pickled gin from bubbly flutes,

our clothes in coils about the stove,

we climbed the dark in birthday suits.

It’s true! The grass was mown that day.

Like hippies chained in meadow flowers,

we tripped above the cut and lay

in blades of petrol suede for hours.

We listened to the lowing black.

We giggled, kissed. We possumed dead.

We woke as flesh and straggled back

like beasts for parlor, dressed, then read.

We trafficked grass in bedspreads, shoes,

and never spoke of that again

through winter’s interregnum blues,

of being spooked by skin, of when

the only care we had was grass,

the only stir for miles around

our freezing bones, our clinking glass,

our dying to be rumbled, found.