Backyard Dialogue
After putting out all summer, daisies
expiring blooms brown as
the smell of steel in a field,
cash in another year.
A rose digests air.
The sky
glides from smell to smell.
In two months, the ground will go white as the moon,
my guide and ancestral heartache.
In the lengthening night,
state fair fireworks: an artillery barrage.
A clematis still blooms.
We do not need to fake innocence.
In the cooling night, the neighbor kid
dribbles and shoots and dribbles;
in the rising water night
no kids hang around Bourbon Street
saying Mister, bet you twenty bucks
I know where you got your shoes.
An otherwise routine August night,
the twigs lie scattered on backyard grass.
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