Men With Crow Wings

Stepping out, the lyrical smell

envelops us, disconcerting but

oddly warm—bar and chain oil, creosote lifting

from the fallen poles my father hauled here

piled in the L of the chopping ground, this proving ground

where I tell my sons about the saw-blade’s kick back and slips,

but it’s not about kick back and slips, pop-talk

for stacking wood, which isn’t about stacking wood,

it’s a about the juniper mulch

of a packrat’s nest, it’s about

the woodpile passenger and the new year’s cork

placed among the acorns like a rodent

shrine to the bounty of stray dog

shit—Robert Burns, I tell them

wrote about this, and I recite what I can and man's dominion,

has broken nature's social union—they rest

their iron wedges and splitters

on the scarred stump

from her perch I see our Crow Mother, a witness

to two boys fortifying a mouse-thief’s home, scraping

composting corncobs into the shagbark bowl, I pray

she caws a companion song, tells the story

of tender relics that circle the hearts of boys,

black-crested with anointing oil, crowned

with softened thorns, two brothers

who received a vision of mice and men

Nopalea

although her hands dripped

with citrus, she found

only decay beneath the peel, she felt

like a dog sniffing the street

for grease, independence

is immaterial, Thoreau taught her that

beyond hunger there is the neapolitan

cut-away of geology where pine nuts sleep

and insects feed on dust, where the rusted

needle points forever down, to master

disappointment, she must touch it, run

the corners of her mouth over the earth, listening

to our chants of root and shovel, she must

hunt the garden of edible fear, her burial sheet

freshly inked with the names of our lost fruit

the medallions of crimson-suited sprouts

are poisonous, they are pained like abdomens

bloated with emptiness, we call her Broomstick

the witch who marches the quail into our camp,

her mouth, like a horn of plenty, bleeds

prickly pear all over the Mazatzals

High Caliber

springfield conversion

trapdoor models jostle

at their sides, they ride

mammon over common

choke-cherry, blue stem

they come barreling

down the plains

tricked out botoxed lips

pulling Goldschläger swigs

off silver sticks

the valleys echo

sweepstakes and

dividends, daytrading

they raise toasts, behind

blurred business ends

of surplus arms

in Louis Vuitton

aiming for meat

the railroad men

skin hides

feed carrion

gas Bentleys

window shopping

buffalo Balenciaga

we see them driving

stock off cliffs until we

learn to be

happy with more