Wheels crackle against gravel

driveway like bubbled-over sugar

beading onto an oven’s metal plate.

I pull my sisters in a red wagon.

We are running from the scalloped edge

that lines our house, the stale tug

taunting us backwards.

Our parents pound out fury

that splatters against trees. An echo

we look back at—

they are a blistering breeze.

They are a fading memory,

a forgotten ingredient, a gap

between layers. Our parents, we imagine,

no longer exist.

If I could fill this wagon full

of sugar, spun like pectin to bind

us. If I could crumble

the walls of our house and grind

like wheat for flour I would

build this night all over.

Dust the sky in glistening powder.

I would glaze over sound,

cutting the sharp bite of regret,

of whispering branches

broken mid-breath, of the spoken

and unspoken.

I would cook us down to dense cores.

When the river rises each spring beyond its banks,

it polishes sandbars, floods pastures and

lifts the remnants—bones, hair, hooves—

of the vanished. All we searched for in vain

during summer and fall when we still cared.

Small parcels of river-bottom largesse.

Our life on the bluff above the flood plain

would not wish death deposited on the doorsill

of its gracious dwelling. Fruiting trees, afternoon

peaches. Flushed, bud-breasted teenagers

a little sweaty on the trim expanse of lawn.

Girls and boys of juice, wearing short shorts,

traversing the early boulevards we older ones

still carry like flares in the darkening field.

Trees utter Him

in colors,

fallen leaves, green

smell of spring

—the crash of limbs

entombed in ice,

torn by winter’s weight,

a gun-shot snap

before the din

of broken limbs,

a sudden stillness

lifting from the forest floor.

Trees speak His name

in sodden moss,

in wind-bent branch,

bark of brail,

shade from sun,

shield from rain,

gnarled roots exposed

clutching the soil.

Trees speak.

They croon, they moan,

they shriek. What God

in this forest dwells?

We learned to sort the piles

of sand, to name the tiny mounds

collecting like to like—unending

process of self-replication. Sitting

at desks not daring to stretch toes

into aisles, we received gold stars

for detailed color-coding, labels in ink,

no erasures allowed. We grew to love this

precise exactness of an uncountable world;

we thought there would come a time

when the lesson would end. Yet I have asked,

and no one remembers the moon-shift,

no one can name for me the precise moment

when tide tables turned

and waters receded from that shore...

grainy expanses hiding uniqueness

among drifting landscapes of windblown dunes.

I have sorted and sorted in search of a name

for this gritty emptiness as the wild wind continues

blowing each grain onward already forming

today’s castles of inconsistency,

disappearing fortresses.