Vineyard, and: Where He Came Down, and: Lucky

Vineyard

You see a man walking the lanes & aisles   of his vineyard & now

The spring tendrils stretch beyond his reach   & you see too there’s a black dog

Beside him a blissful Lab who slices across   a horizon still white with dawn

You see this landscape is the landscape of   my valley the one I remember

Out of the plunder that is the swollen glow   of reflection & so to you I’ll say

That a man is walking & I’ll tell you now he’s   an older man & do you see his son

Behind him only nineteen or twenty no more his   wool sweater wrapped

Around him the color of the dust at his feet   a rich gold without equal

& now the sun begins to rub itself across   the sky & this is the dog’s life

Yet also the man’s as well & he knows soon   this boy will be leaving the valley

With a girl even younger than his son   in a silver Pontiac LeMans

North along Highway 99 north all the way   until they cross into Canada

Where anyone who wants to send his son   to die won’t be able to find him

& so there among the aisles & lanes & heavy   grapes the father stops & the dog

Stops to turn & face the boy who drags a hand   slowly along the Lab’s silky head

& quietly wraps his skinny arms around his father   & in the vineyard dust that’s all

Where He Came Down

In a field of weeds blowing behind a Texaco station   in Cheyenne, Wyoming

In a hallway outside the door of his dealer’s ex-wife where   he knows she’s hiding with her grandfather’s Luger

On the pine-shadowed bank of the Merced River & beneath   the blistering sunlight washing over Tuolumne   Meadows

Watching the prairie falcons & minute pine siskins   & the ending of someone’s love

Or in the old apartment off North Avenue the blood-sketched   floor scattered with strangers’ works

Or in the one empty stall in the Plaza men’s room just before   the awards ceremony begins     & lastly into

Those thin careful arms awaiting Icarus

Lucky

After a week of long winds & rain the sun broke from the Sierras   & I sat on the porch watching

The dark tables of turned-under corn & tall alfalfa   & the dead glistening grasses

Across the road the wide field & the abandoned house   I’m walking to

Months vacant & paint-flaked now a place where kids   come to drink & fuck

The weather-pocked shed down to its bones its skin ripped up   for firewood

In the back garbage still scattered & waiting to be carted off   or buried   the grass below it given up

I look in the glassless window & on the floor just a striped   blood-brown mattress & empty green wine

& rust-colored beer bottles a few old rippled magazines   & in the corner

The body of a hen her head broken to one side her back   flat to the floor legs up the low

Underside of her belly eaten open—white feathers at wound’s   edge still curled over the dry rim

The whole guts of the crater stony gray & stiff the half-   gnawed entrails black

*

Now this afternoon in the cold late-day sunlight

I have come to pick the roses at the front of the abandoned house   grown wild in their winter bloom & tangled

Thick as nests as the thin branches of the climbers arc in long trails   across the yard their pink babies’ fists

Beating on the wind & along the broken picket fence the green   all hung with rose stars—scarlet or crimson

All the blushes of red—& a few struck white & one the color   of peach flesh or apricot

& pairs of small yellow lips & others burnt gold & three like melons   thick-petaled suns & in each bush the dark

Stiff-stemmed rose hips nodding like skulls

*

That night when my headlights hit the front of the old house

She came from its far side running through the wall   of roses choking & biting on the air

As she made it finally to...