he buried a wish, a bird with feathers black and brown.

Down it fluttered, or escaped. Like a window opening,

climbing through itself out of this locked town.

West of the rudbeckia beds a pink full moon drifted.

Descending its arc, picking orders for the shut-ins.

The wake of its route like a burst of high-def pictures

rang when the bird opened like a pink velvet purse, poured out

its silver clatter, its skeletal kite with tail tied of loops

like sharp earrings on fish string that rounded the wish

and loosened it again, a silence sinking

the blue lassos of cardinal flowers. He gave himself up.

The moon burned like tallow. Above the prairie, like static

in the clouds, a mask of forgiveness wore his heart.

His love was about the weight of a mouse nest.

Something vernal, something infernal had bitten the neck

of the doe and run away, another’s voice in its mouth, blood in its teeth.

When the fox cried, thunder pounded through the door.

The line hummed where the grass lay flattened,

bent by runoff gone from the rain ditch: tracks

through a fairy tale about the soul. At the bird feeder, the bird

with brown feathers and no name. Above the stump

where evening settled, the morning sun felt warm.

He gaveled the last cinders from the cellar of his burnt heart.

Others will find where the promise rests. In the temple

the smoke disperses, the sacrifices, caged or tied, all let go.

In the shed, high in the eaves, a colony of paper wasps

enclosing a future, pasting lives into rounds of sealed cells.

He bends, translating the fennel. With every turn of breath,

another alterity lost. Behind him, the rising daylight

painting it eggshell blue, a house he once thought he lived in

floats in the air.