It began like this : a radio

midday, heat—remember?—a shriek



on the highway, and in the yard

Steller’s jays chafing over haggle, nag, their claims



a lyric tableau—pretty for the eye—how

sun for months stuck aureoles



of chrome around everything, even

your poems, omens



so no other disaster would happen.

But that there was dust—



it had not been so before in June,

grass dead at edges



where a dirt spread had begun, feral

cats interring piss into nasturtiums.



His death had become

the dropped side of a song, melody



undone by damage

exactly the feel of teeth entering



an apple’s bruise. The trellis kept

the jasmine rapt



as it collapsed in its own odor; so ardor also

trained the spine



of your weeping into a mind,

confluence of fumes and confusion. Over sills,



jambs, silt sent collusion : thistle, burr, mouse

turds, urine’s lingering funk in rooms



where to write was a widow

alone with the last broom she’d bought. Heat,

with its missing finger

and nine filed nails, tuned all afternoon



its blue note : horizon a slack string tautening

against asphalt, whose sound



was drought, marsh departed

before August began, black-outs rolled



house to house, how perfect the fraud and emergencies.

So there were two songs



sung in counterpoint

to jays, argument about belonging to



a place,—remember—

prey and prayer, one struck



the other beneath the lyric image, playing flint

to tinder until on the radio



eastern hills caught fire : extremis,

excelsis, that is



how summer, all veils

and exhalations, courted the hills. How



already the church was burning

when your soul went out to meet him, to marry



his new weather—