Yarn 66
Tonight the snow lays a perfect blue pelt
Under the pin oaks in the front yard.
The busy, storm stopped highway
Is hidden as the wolf moon,
But we are vile beneath the pure screen,
Engines of indifference and violence.
A father thinks of how they beat his son
Till his cheek broke, his teeth, an eye socket,
Then left him like Lorca behind a downtown
Building before morning could warm him.
The moon is the closest it will be to Earth
All year, and if I were a wolf, I’d find
A high howling place to throw my head back.
O Lost.
_________________________
Yarn 51
They never finished the last set.
He was up 4-2 on the old man
when the back spasm hit him,
and he felt a pang of guilt having
sent him scrambling back for a lob,
guilty for the service aces, the lead;
sixty-one, walking fire prayers
back to the Starlet—they never
finished the last set—left the
rivalry and the agony there
on the faded green asphalt
like an unfinished novel
abandoned on a perfect sunny
August afternoon, the way
the dead desert memories.
______________________
Yarn 38
The pink in Karl Rove’s divorce face
is the delicate shade he remembers
from his pale skinned uncle who
worked a Royal Crown Cola route
and always sat smoking on soda crates
stacked out front of that big double wide—
or maybe those raw splotches,
Carolina-shaped birthmarks
on the underside of the Grandma’s Jersey,
Brownie, the last milker—perhaps the blush
above Grandpa’s eyes when he cussed
about the stupidity of naming a cow,
the church usher’s corpse-like cheeks,
escorting a mourning widow to the front pew
or just God his self like Karl, pink clouds
bordering iridescent light in the fresco.