Backcountry Oracles

Before leaving me for good you said the morning starlings had spoke to you.

Now the house smells like indigo dye–recall the scent of your mother's curtains when we arrived at the first funeral. Draped in a shade of purple I'd said you looked like one of the main street grain girls. Shut up and take the picture, you'd said.

There were times when I remembered loving you–a broken attic staircase or an aged scar from a blunt bowie knife. Did you graffiti the trailer on Wagner Road? The sun is a low hum on the Appalachians and I want to get high again and again while climbing the neighbor's silo.

Someone once wrote that people in Hell just want a drink of water, but I don't feel like reading these days. Everything is fog and carburetors on a mud-wet backroad. What's clear to me now is the bark of the neighbor’s hound and the hollow blasts of a 10-gauge downstream from where you last prophesied: the weather is gypsum, everlasting.