Landscape: stages

I traced a facsimile

on a sheet of graph paper:

the boreal forest. A field loud

with colorless birds. Delirious

as a midnight locomotive,

mood ring, you should be afraid

of me. Faithfully, faithfully,

I have fed on regrets

and reddened sentiments, a season

like the strain of a canary

in the apartment next door.

What regrets. A sense of the public

contracting like a woman’s chest.

My most brutal loneliness,

those fields ripping by

the covered wagon. Last night

under the stage lights,

I was taken by bare resignation,

a new fault line craning inside me.

To keep from crying, I considered you

a frontier, a fallowed wing.

I bit my lip into a talisman.