Night racheted shut and trembling with wires of sleet-light, somewhere in the Arkansas dark

my granddaddy’s trotlines are freezing into the river and the ice-wrecked organs

of the cutbait spin endlessly waiting for the dead’s hand to work it loose—

darkness galloping over the mountains and down the hills stitched with railroads

and creeks like patchwork leather twisted into a fist under the Southern Cross

in its coldness, not a soul around to speak of the sad errands of the night, coyotes

scrapping up and down the river, the air stung with the sweet iron

of rabbit blood, and if it’s spring no one can tell for all the icy ribs of barns,

and the whine of butane heaters, the long hours locked between sleep and waking,

between the clotted dream world and the thin cook-box of a trailer—imagine a dog

that hunches above the bed, drinking up sleep—then it finally happens, that first

breathless gasp when the bottom falls out and you stand on the killing floor

of whatever dream your fever cooked up from the placid black waters of the brain: maybe

you’re dragged through every scorched snake bed in the state, chained to the ballhitch

of your daddy’s pickup and he’s driving with that wicked look in his eye, maybe

you come to, standing knee-high in an ocean of crankshafts and gummy mufflers

that multiply as you try to drag yourself from their grasp, or maybe you’re lost

in the last wild place on earth, the rest of it all gone down to some disaster or another

and there in the last unpolluted stream a man is drowning himself and a horse tied

to a tree has caught fire—smell the burning flesh, the burst capillaries, the horse now a kiln

for its own wasted salt, smell the last wind scratching down the last honeysuckle briar

breaking out in bees that have come back for their lost share.