Hush

Now the dust comes as sleep does.

Through the bulrush, shuddering

with the thunder deviled horses bring—

rising hoof and hock, black-

pelted, keeping the wheat

that once whispered us awake.

There is no breath in the moving

dark. We cut cloths to cover

our mouths, wet the windows

with bedsheets, rip the seams

of feed sacks, but nothing hides us

from the earth. Like a god’s

son, it returns. Not to feast

with a thousand wine-finned fish,

but to remind us of our sins:

last year and luminous as a lion,

the corn crop was a ladder tall

before it fell. Without the rain,

its kernels curl, spilling to our feet,

where even we can’t crush them

into something we could price.

Like anyone who tastes fortune,

we took to loving light. But now dust

dwells in our house as we do,

the rip-rugs so turned with dirt

they could be gold beneath. Quiet

silt sits over our eyes, gilding them

as if with a story only children tell.

Those with the strongest wings,

as the saints said, can escape.

But the wind is in the rest of us—

dry-spired, bound to our bones—

while the snow falls red in the east.