Way Gone

                    for Nettelbeck

1. RED TIDE

The Bones of Clouds
He dropped coins into the burning
pool & made a wish

Close Cover Before Striking
Breath fogging the windshield
half-past midnight & going nowhere
gets to be habit
the world in flames

Unsolved
The body of a young woman
in the parking lot at Greyhound Beach
burned beyond recognition

2. NINE HOURS

                        “doll house in a shallow grave”

I can still hear you
breathing

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Mockingbird, my nightingale, sing sweetly now

                  Who do I need to kill?

3. UNCONFIRMED REPORTS

Her finger tracing
the faded red highway line
on an old defunct triple-A map

It’s a road like a vein that
no longer has a pulse
          going nowhere beneath
                    a sky the color of cough syrup
                              but with ocean-colored feathers

“Lead her to the shadows: that place is fitting for the silent.
She shall be a nymph…” as Publius Ovidius Naso says,
but a nymph of “infernal swamps” or something (I don’t have the book within reach)

                  It’s all a game of echoes
                                              emotional sonar
                              done with mirrors
a still life
in blood the shadow
no longer there