My name is sand: I make
Dumbshows on windowshades;
Wring hands; dissolve; swirl back;
Play furious, grim charades.

An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.

Lately I am changing houses like sneakers and socks.
Time zones wrinkle off me casually.
I have put aside with the laundry
a row of borrowed kitchens, look-alikes
in which I crack the eggs and burn the toast
but even in Danville, Kentucky, my ghosts
come along, they relocate as easily as livestock

The last grasshoppers
thinner than political prisoners
breast up out of the goldenrod.
They know they are flying into
the end of the journey.

A twitch stung from above face
I make a fever pitch
of $25 in coin
to help the large mammal
building

I lean on the wind and the wind leans on me.
We throw our arms around each other,
trying to stay upright, old drinking buddies,

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.

Just popped the collar of my robe in this motherfucker,
I.e. kitchen, as I make some sweet-ass hash browns.
Is that the start of a poem? It’s barely the start of breakfast.

 Today I’m thinking of all the people not in love: I’m with you!
I’d like to say, though one of the conditions
Of not being in love is that you can’t hear other people not in love.

Beauty, I’ve seen you
pressed hard against the windowpane.
But the ugliness was unsolved
in the heart & mouth.
I’ve seen the quick-draw artist
crouch among the chrysanthemums.
Do I need to say more?

If only he could touch her,
Her name like an old wish
In the stopped weather of salt
On a snail…

Hand-to-hand: the two hugged each other
into a naked tussle, one riding the other’s back,
locking into a double embrace. One
forced the other to kiss the ground,

The year 1936 was not a good year in America, except perhaps for the hundreds of people staring from the pages of the book, faces mostly smiling, filled with the youthful hope and confidence and ignorance that would allow them to see the future beyond the Great Depression.