Desiree Remick
How During the Mowing, the Good Tree Downhearted, I State Miracles Someplace,
Saving What Relentless Bellow, In What Cowers Far Down After the Quiet Vine
Confession. Beautiful fever. God and I. The kudzu was
illegible. Among my outskirts, a mountain. Everything waits
for the howling expressway. Daniel Boone’s learning how to
be dead. Didn’t Ma believe in the arrows and shoes? Mainly
she calls on policemen to carry the grocery. I’m like a quiet,
wind-pummeled tree, amazed to witness “I.” The months felt
used, leaning across long wet nights; I’m next. Great
conversation in 40 words, hexagonal barns and mercy
growing in me. I’m careful, no range of dying comes in
different flickers over background air. I killed six acres of
moon, all of it, the double-wide pattern, this story. Like the
possum I brought when I retired, its cooling heart waiting
and watching—why? She is the casual lady mowing the
middle of the street for our many warm horses. The ways we
might almost live better haven’t come into what we’re trying
to do up here. And a good man died in my brother’s tractor-
trailer, in each given part, and first we should believe. In the
cool, dead sun, the fire stills, now flickering, now forward so
we take time in the grave. People are so afraid of cracks in
the head, only there’s a glossy black knot out in the coal-
hard night. They tell no red right, who’ve asked you to live
out in the rain, the overpass I last rode on tonight. That’s the
best I can want—here, not there—when all there is weaved
me in it; what I say, I won’t. The snake thing on Ma’s helmet
is impossible to make up, so I pretend I see it or hear it when
I go. It was the other one, the bat not the dog, when that’s
what I was to us, when I had many in the black. Does the
thing I’m in understand why, when it’s cold, we did this to
the horses, before I’m on it in these, in a moment?
All the words in this poem, including those in the title, were taken from Ada Limón’s book Bright Dead Things and rearranged in a new order.