i dream of you as buzzard wings and chicken wire

waltzing through the farm tool section of tractor supply.

monday morning in the pasture: i see your babyface gleam

like every yolky backcountry sky in the september dusk

a fledgling sparrow cradled in your sun-blistered hand

that you hold out for me to look at, saying: “imagine how

pretty the world looked when everything was this small.”

and there’s no question of how you long for a front-row

ticket to watch a rerun of creation—see the sky gather

into existence like a stormcloud growing in far corners

of the hay fields, black eating blue. you’re hungry too—

you, baby, breakdown of a love poem as harmonica music

in a walmart parking lot, kaleidoscopic whir of solar

panels in fields across the street from the venison-

processing plant, every in-my-feelings lucinda williams

song burning through speakers at 80mph on aiken county

backroads. it’s always the same in the end, though. you

can’t waltz—tripping over toolboxes, coughing from

your inevitable exposure to pesticides. maybe, like your

unhinged longing to watch earth begin again in smallness,

i just want to be around you before the dichloropropene

takes you out. maybe, our love poem is going back

to the pasture and eating walmart-brand granola bars

in the coastal bermuda—my body turning into buzzard

wings, turning into blustery wind, turning into the chicken

wire that wages unending war on your open-skinned knees.