Spy satellite sees a blue circle bisected
by a fine pink line, and looming closer, two black points
polluting the purity of the line:

That’s me and David. For us, the sea is divided,
neat as if Aaron laid down Moses’ staff
between gulf and bay. Granite monoliths

tilted, strewn every which way, held up
by sharp-edged riprap and nothing.
A bad fall would be fatal.

It’s a good thing
we’re already damned.
We’ve been damned a long time now,

long enough to memorize
each particular pattern of pink feldspar,
hornblende, and white quartz earth-heat

and earth-push metamorphosed once
into these rough hewn cubes
civilization could build a pyramid of.

We clamber over, clamber
north toward a terra firm
which erodes, recedes with each wave,

with each summer’s heavy hurricane.
David’s gone on ahead, and who can blame him?
At this distance, a tiny stick man

weighing down a fine line boundaried
by most of the planet’s salt.
My two bad knees stumble on,

sun startling water from flesh,
calcium from bone,
coagulating capillary blood.

The ocean’s full of man o’ wars
and blue crabs and stingrays, claws
and stingers poised, feeding on the carrion

of each other. A lone glaucous gull squawks
overhead, prophesying nothing
but more algae-slimed rock to cross

and the west wind shreds high tide,
lashes my left side with salt-sand spray.
The water smells of death and gasoline.

We’re already dead.
We’ve been dead a long time now.
But if we fall we’ll be reborn to this:

shrimp trawlers crawl in trailing empty
sun-rotted nets like the wings of ragged butterflies
nearing the end of their annual migrations.

There are no shrimp.
There have been no shrimp forever.
Oil still pours a rainbow

from its corroded barge. Hasn’t it always
been flowing? Hasn’t our blood? Out of reach
a dolphin blows, breathes, sinks.

Harvest

He stands beside his father on the Gleaner
gripping the metal rail tight in both hands
staring down into the sun blur of sickle,
clouds of dust and straw and chaff blown behind,
and all the way to the horizon, to the curve
of round earth across the plain, nothing but wheat
and a cloud of dust for each combine cutting.
When wheat fills the machine, his father starts
the auger and a stream of gold pours into
the truck, where he is not allowed to play
since nearly every year a boy falls asleep
in the sun on that pile of gold smelling
of bread in the hear of late June and is
buried alive by his father under
the grain we in those parts of Oklahoma
all lived to raise from red soil. Thirteen hours
the sun spun across unbroken blue sky,
thirteen hours we and the Gleaner gleaned
until moon rose and dew fell too heavy
down and wet the ripe wheat, and the silence
in that absence of machine was an abyss
only crickets could understand. I see the boy
there on that machine, the sure hands of his father
on the wheel, on the levers that sped or
slowed, raised or lowered to keep the wheat feeding
evenly in. How the boy stares down into
that spin of bright hot steel, of well-oiled blade
against steel cutter bar, the auger whirling,
a steel cylinder pulling fate and will together
where steel fingers grab grain and chaff and straw,
shove it all into the metal monster’s
ravenous maw. I watch the boy hold tight
and I hope he will not fall.

These poems first appeared in The Southern Review and Western Humanities Review, respectively.