It's a still Thursday nite, still too hot at 11.

The infamous now less than one hundred yards away, balled angry white lightning, the diesel under hood, welcome neighbor, women’s screams animal from your backyard & metal. When the dark enters the goldfinch, all thirty, leave the tree for where the sun goes & mama put old truck side mirrors there, vain pretty birds she says like women in feminine moments in the bathroom, change the bulbs for good eyebrow lines & reconfigure. When I hear your dogs bark from your yard, when I see the girl in the store with all the turquoise & black tight skirt, I know I’m done in for—bugs at the screen & lightning with the monsoon somewhere swung in behind the mountains still but coming, the rumble annunciation. At the intersection, I told myself go through downtown, I felt I should for my whole body unknowing, where we meet head on unknowing, & I wave to you & you do something with your body, whatever shock tightens or bereft, medicated so as to erase every memory you’ve had of hardness. Linnet the screen & the pincher, the neighbor’s son Gio figuring out man while manning the shovel. The last full day in the south LaRue entered the man high dog fennel for a rattler & came out empty handed, my thighs stuck to the seat of the truck waiting in wading boots hemmed snake. Morning pejorative but the afternoon levels as low tide I remember my feet there not long ago but I’m now on a different life now, one more softened as in a Sunday longing for nothing more than desert rain, Loretta Lynn Hymns, Thelonius Monk on the straightaway, bringing it home, brought beyond where I thought life would end, these newer parts, I dress as I would have ten years ago & lit candles to Mary.