Blackberries 

Ants stream to the berrries, berries pricked
with hairs like anty legs. Birds
squall in the shadows. The sunken cellar
of the burned house swells
with living chains, spiked
and flourishing. A kind of eternity 

the bee trembles upon, a kind that claws
the skin. This creekbed
is a place we cannot travel, red-black
with living barbed wire. 

          It leaves us
to our silence, a bounty
we cannot gather, a feast
armored by itself, as vast
and tangled as the days
we will not live, foundations
broken and scattered
under vines like the skeleton of fire. 

Mine Shaft 

The road here
scrawls, erased, wash-slashed, finally
not-road. A single black
plant of barbed wire, and a slide
of rocks hard as pennies. 

Boards shrink
around square nails. Sun 
slips through the gaps, 
laying yellow strips veined
like meat in the dark. 

Holding our breath,
everything we have done
is pointless. Spilled gravel whispers
from side to side, and ticks
the bottom. So far,
says the body. 

                    Fall
in, says the body. 

                A sift
 of sand stretches
and lets go. 

The dark around every single word we will ever say. 
 

Drought 

               Morning,
the rake handle palmed
gray, the lemon scent brightens the air,
leaves and brown rind raked into a pile. 
Evening, the feral cats 

pause at the saucer of chicken meat.
When they are gone, the meat-sweat
on the saucer is stroked
by a jewel, a wasp from the eaves 

kissing the dish. We talk
into dark, crickets everywhere,
and when we hear something drinking
from the fishpond you mouth

“coyote,” until he runs,
invisible behind the wisteria, past
the tractor roped by dried 
morning glory to earth. 

And our neighbor down the road begins
to break the law: he burns
his weeds, his secret fire
touching us with its black
breath. A man with a yellow setter, 

and an easy laugh. We know how he
waits with his hose, his rake,
thinking: it will be all right. 
Thinking no one knows. 
Herding the red lizards of his fine.