Survival Site

Been here for a while, scythe in hand, the sky a grief-grid shot through with fortuitous dreaming. Sometimes a letter. Two in my boot. Lenses spattered with dusts that were formerly dusts beyond hills & at the bottom of a sunbaked lakebed. Fran requests a witty dictum. Scrolls spill their tales, claims, questions—the whole bloody rigmarole unspooling through moments strewn with ampersands & azaleas. Whiff of the real McCoy. He been here with us, accounting, recounting, setting the letters of an ink press rattling. Thunder shakes the canyon. A hawk-shadow traces the bones of a distant cousin. I found a journal in a sun-bleached wagon. Entries of regret, sketch of a compound, stray memory from a Michigan dune. Wine stain, blood stain, residue of life. We’re home? Junipers know our dreams. Eyes jerk under lids. A bark canoe appears. We board it. Fingers trace wishes on water. Trees slide by. Ramon passes the jerky. I gnaw it. The falls approach. We ditch, swim, sprint uphill as fear lashes our calves. Silence. Flame-crackle. Night infested with stars. In a fawn-skin pouch, I keep a letter of introduction. Upon it I lay my head.