Hawthorne St. Blues

The singing frog melody lasts just a bar
and a bird up above with a harmony jarring
my memory of sleep a mile from the star
that killed the real poet with its broken guitar.

Can you silence the sound of a house when it dreams
of carpenters’ nails that penetrate beams
of moonlight that pours through its skin at the seams
of that place between branding and calving and cream?

We were married here behind this house.
In ten thousand years, we’re heading south.

The people around town are dropping like flies.
Lives that I see through compounded eyes
are chain-linked like wings and the wires and cries
of trash-eating crows. Then another bird dies.

And then reason proposed, and I took her hand,
swallowed nostalgia and hired a band,
tore the tops off of all of the songs that I’d canned,
buried them deep in the clay and the sand.

I love you today like winter loves snow,
like time wants a ticking, like knowledge needs know.
The children we reap were the babies we sow,
keeping them close by letting them go.