from “Dissolve” 

There’s a way out—
walk the dirt road into cerulean dawn, 
tap the windows of cars and trucks 
rattling down highway 77 
with clear fingerprints, 
and clasp the nine eyes of the desert 
shut at the intersection of then and now. 

Ask: will this whirlwind 
connect to that one,
          making them cousins to the knife? 

Will lake mist etched 
on flakes of flood-birthed moonlight 
hang its beard on a tow truck
hoisting up a buck,  	
          butterflies leaking from its nostrils, 
          dark clouds draining off its cedar coat?
Credit

Copyright © 2018 by Sherwin Bitsui. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 6, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“This fragment comes out of the latter half of my forthcoming book-length poem Dissolve. In this moment, the poem’s speaker may be offering the reader some kind of strategy for exiting the work. The series of actions: tap, clasp, and ask are ritual movements/utterances that may or may not provide the ways for escaping the poem’s gravity.”
—Sherwin Bitsui