False Prairies

It takes a while to learn what it means, living in the country;
men walk by politely in an aura of sun-stale cigarettes. I
flirt with a boy who ends up dizzying me with old sweat
like discoloured tin. Some thunderous, black-eyed Raskolnikov
he makes, cuts on his fingers not cleaned, but dirtied. They heal
out of sheer necessity, with no time for pity. I bow, and wander off,
a Chinese silk-kite girl.
You keep your backyard wild-cucumbered over with junk. By
the bread-black ditches, you pace around with your witching
sticks, humming tonelessly. I read Kipling, overjoyed in a truck-bed at dusk.
The wild cucumbers burst delicately underfoot. Some sulfurous, hard-eyed Gilgamesh
he makes, shoulders back against the wind of this
false prairie.
I played my trick a day too early.
Peach-yellow and frail, light wafts through like onion skins,
you think of yourself in terms of stone-white bones.
The sun rackets off the hood of a car. The lines
come early in our foreheads here. Some fountainous,
cobalt-eyed Lear he makes against an egg-blue barn;
the fingers twitch and tug up dandelion leaves. I've got
the fingers of my one hand woven into this town down to the webs.
What my other hand is reaching for is anyon'e guess. Typhoid-bright,
the clouds go cotton, the spires of trees up against the sky are
more or less divine.