Some places we can’t refuse. This is the night
I never arrived, never called, and even a few hours after
the storm the trees are trying to tell me things
I don’t want to hear. The land around is empty with
sinkholes, what a chart on the wall says are
the slow crumblings of the limestone base. This is the place
where the earth sucks in fences, rusted hay rakes,
barns leaning on braces of 4 x 8’s for a few years
to delay but not refuse geography. It’s the farmers
who make best use of them—filling the holes with
garbage, cuttings, even old cars that disappear
after several months or years. Here the dirty earth
pulls in everything, covers it over, turns it into
itself, so you don’t refuse anything, not even love.
At least that’s what the woman at the end of the counter
tries to tell everyone here as long as the storm has kept us
together, and maybe she’s right. At least it’s a word
that gets taken in by others—the way it is spoken in
anything sloven, like the young drunk knocking hell
out of the condom machine in the trucker’s rest room
planning to climb into some girl as if she were earth,
or even the beautiful plover that’s just threatening to reemerge.
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