Blood Moon

Ditches constellate with possum
limbs and plastic coffee
cups thrown from passing cars,
and I river there, tonight, unable to row
while the red sky presses down on me,
the dead assembling somewhere I can’t
follow. Some things will be gone from us
forever, you said, before you left
                           forever. I can’t begin
to imagine where the world ends
when the minutes have rendered me
past in pastures I’ve never loved
but can’t leave. Where cattle low
for no reason except to be known. Where
I must still, while all around the wind
fails to bring anyone back to me.
Where the night is red and all
that is between us. Where did I last
see you? Where did I leave myself
if not somewhere I called home
which no one can enter, except through
             memory? I miss you,
but I miss yesterday more. Unbury
the stars in a sky that is not red
at all, but ruddy brown. That sweet sun
-down inside my bones, now. It hurts
to imagine that we never really know
anyone. That I will disappear before
the night, guilty of hunger and harm,
the sounds of fall in my ears: crab-
apples falling to rot under trees.
The sickle wind dying quietly inside
the places it seeks, and is lost.

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