Grand parenthesis

Stuff the mattress with wings of ducks

Try to sleep in the rye-flavoured dusk

If you can’t sleep, just think of somewhere you really liked to be

Stare at the ceiling until the stucco blows cloud figures

Wonder why they have fed you to the Hardy Boys

Over your head squirrels tumble through the attic rafters

The bedside basin, porcelain monstrance poised on a tea towel, smells of locust love

Wonder at the snakes outside your window

Wonder why everything takes longer for you

Snakes wing through the summer swamp air

Snakes whose mouths meal mayflies, smash moths

By the front door his rain boots wait for you and tomorrow

And tomorrow among the mourning doves

you take a stick to the fields

poke at steaming meteors of earth

point at crows, at orioles the colour of Hallowe’en

Now the walls begin to spin

and sleep smashes through the window

snapping you up in its fine teeth

And tomorrow

a green pasture ringed with conifers overgrown like the mouldering spines of giants

in back-fifty hems the evergreens stitch the land in this new morning after

Grandpa and you stand on the hill

his grey furred neck softly ruffed with gills

(He slept outside last night, the dew settling on his chill skin)

Cows coloured like chessboards amble the pastures, digesting

the hair of the land still green on their lips

The sparrows stay out of sight, their uneven whistle piping a lift into this morning after

Grandpa and you watch the sudden aurora strike this Easter sky

On the horizon, a row of new fires plume

alternative, historic suns

Above their white heat, the smoke skeins of older explosions rime the red clouds

Grandpa looks at you with eyes like fossils stolen from an empty beach

What now? you want to ask him

but he would ask you the same question

From a hundred miles away

the morning fires burn the tongues out of your staring heads

The cattle graze, indifferent to the fusing sky